[mkondo, noun. Current, flow, rush, passage, run, e.g., of water in a river or poured on the ground; of air through a door or window, i.e., a draft; of the wake of a ship, a track, the run of an animal.]
In October of 1983, an American named Ward Beach was sent to Tanzania by the Ohio Museum of Natural History to obtain the fossil of a prehistoric bird. Teams of European paleontologists had found something like the Chinese caudipteryx—a small, feathered reptile—in the limestone hills west of Tanga and the museum was eager to get one for itself. Ward was not a paleontologist (halfway to his doctorate he had given up) but he was a competent fossil hunter and an ambitious man. He did not like the work itself—backbreaking hours with a chisel and sifting pan, blind alleys, dead ends, disappointments—but he liked the idea behind the work. To discover fossils, he told himself, was to reclaim answers to important questions.
He was driving the nameless ridge he’d driven to the dig site every day for two months when he came upon a woman running in the road. She wore sandals and a khanga tied loosely above her knees and her hair bounced against her back in a thick braid. The road narrowed and kinked as it climbed under a blazing sun, with a flat density of growth on both sides. He made to pass her but she darted in front of his truck. He braked, skidded, went up on two wheels and nearly slid over the edge. She did not look back.
Ward leaned over the wheel. Had that really happened? Had that woman dashed out in front of his truck? Up ahead she was sprinting now, her sandals raising dust. He followed. She ran as if chasing something, like a predator, running expertly and without wasted motion. He had never seen anything like her; she did not glance back, not once. He eased the truck closer until her heels were just missing the bumper. Above the engine noise he could hear her breath storming in and out. They went like this for ten minutes: Ward over the wheel, hardly breathing, possessed with something—anger, curiosity, maybe, already, desire; and the woman charging uphill, braid bouncing, her legs churning like pistons beneath her. She did not slow. When they reached the road’s summit, a puddled hilltop steaming in the sun, she spun and leapt onto the hood of the truck. He braked; the truck slid heavily in the mud. She turned onto her back, hooked her hands around the sides of the windshield and gasped for air.
Keep driving! she yelled in English. I want to feel the wind!
He sat a moment, watching the back of her neck through the glass. Could he say no, after chasing her up the hill? Could he drive with her on the hood?
But already, as if his foot was not his own, he had let up on the brake and the truck was coasting downhill, gradually picking up speed. There were tight, desperate bends in the road: he watched the muscles in her arms tighten as she clenched the frame of the truck. He passed the dig site and drove on, for a half hour or more, over sheer, badly rutted roads, the braid of her hair swinging over the windshield, the cords in her shoulders standing out. The truck bounced over potholes, lilted into curves. Still she clung to the hood. Finally the road ended: there was a dense tangle of vines and below a steep ravine at the bottom of which the rusting frame of a car lay mangled and bent. Ward opened his door; he was nearly hyperventilating.
Miss, he began, are you . . .
Listen to my heart, she said. And he did—as if watching from a distance he saw himself get out and place his ear against her sternum. What he heard was like an engine, like the engine of the truck thrumming beneath her. He could hear the great muscle of her heart washing blood into the corridors of her body, the wind of her breath howling in her lungs. Never had he imagined a sound so alive.
I’ve seen you in the forest, she said. Digging in the clay with shovels. What are you looking for?
A bird, he stammered. An important bird.
She laughed. You look for birds in the earth?
It’s a dead bird. We’re looking for its bones.
Why don’t you look for living birds? There are so many.
I’m not getting paid to look for them.
No? She climbed off the hood and stepped through the bamboo at the end of the road.
Two nights later he was outside her parents’ house wondering if he should have come. Her name was Naima; her parents, shy and prosperous tea farmers, lived above the bean fields and banana plantations on a small holding—four acres of tea, a three-room cottage and a glass-walled tea nursery—high in the Usambara Mountains, a craggy and forested range south of Kilimanjaro and west of the Indian Ocean, a last pocket of rainforest that had once stretched all the way to Tanzania from the West African coast. Locusts screamed in a bank of eucalyptus behind the nursery; the first stars guttered overhead. Ward had filled the flatbed of the truck with basketed flowers: hibiscus, lantana, honeysuckle, others he could not guess the names of.
Her parents stood in the doorway. Naima walked around the truck several times. Finally she reached in, pinched a daisy from its stem, and tucked it behind her ear. Can you catch me? she asked.
What? said Ward.
But already she was running, galloping around the tea nursery and into the trees. Ward glanced at her parents in the doorway— their faces were blank—and jogged after her. It was twice as dark under the canopy of leaves; exposed roots laced the path; branches lashed his chest. He caught one glimpse of her: leaping deadfall, dodging saplings. Then she was gone. It was so dark. He fell once, twice. There was a fork in the trail, then another; like arteries the trails branched out from central trunks, subdividing a hundred times; he had no idea which way she might have gone. He listened for her but heard only insects, frogs, leaves shifting.
Eventually he turned back, picking his way carefully down to the house. He helped her mother haul water from the creek; he drank tea with her father beside a charcoal fire. Still Naima didn’t return. Her father shrugged over the rim of his teacup. Sometimes she is gone half the night, he said. She will come back. She always comes back. If I prevented her from going she would be unhappy. Her mother said Naima was old enough to make her own decisions.
When he left she still hadn’t returned. It was a long way down to his hotel, two hours bouncing over potholed roads, and Ward could not shake the memory of her clinging to the hood of his truck, the way the cords in her arms strained against her skin, the arch of her fingers, the drumming of her heart. Two nights later he returned to her house, and again two nights after that. Each time he brought her something: a fossilized trilobite hung from a gold chain, a tiny wooden box with an array of purple crystals nested inside. She’d smile, lift the gift to the light or press it against her cheek. Thank you, she’d say. Ward would look down at his boots and mumble that it was nothing.
During dinner he’d describe where he was from: Ohio, the gleaming skyscrapers, the rows of town houses, the collection of butterflies in his museum. She listened avidly, her palms flat on the table, leaning forward. She asked many questions: What is the soil like? What kind of animals live there? Have you seen a tornado? He invented half-accurate natural histories of Ohio: dinosaurs battling on the plains; vast flocks of prehistoric geese flowing over stunted trees. But he didn’t have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn’t explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him. He couldn’t tell her that at night, sweating in the folds of his mosquito net, he had begun to recite her name over and over, as if it were a spell that might summon her into his room.
Invariably, after dark, she’d gallop into the labyrinth of trails behind her house, challenging him to catch her. Each time he managed to pursue her a bit deeper down a path before he stumbled over a rock and cut his palm or fell into thorns and shredded his shirt. He began staying later and later into the night, tinkering in the tea nursery with her father or sitting at the table with her mother in polite, awkward silence. Always he had to leave before she returned, driving south toward the hotel in Tanga, with the truck shaking over the road and the first shafts of light springing above the mountains.
Months steamed forward: December, January, February. Ward got the museum a complete fossil of their prehistoric bird—its delicate needle-sized bones folded into a block of limestone—and they wanted him back in Ohio. His airplane ticket was for the first of March but he delayed it and begged two weeks of vacation time and a room in Korogwe, a small town beneath the mountains where Naima lived. Every day for those two weeks he crossed the river and drove north into the labyrinth of muddy switchbacks that dead-ended at her parents’ home.
He brought her tennis shoes and T-shirts; packets of pumpkin seeds for her mother, paperback novels for her father. Naima would give him that same inscrutable smile. At dinner she asked more about the world he came from: What does winter smell like? How does it feel to lie down in snow? But every night, chasing her farther through the forest, he lost her. Tell me what to do! he’d shout into the darkening hills. Tell me which way you’ve gone! And when he lay on the cot in his room, gripped with exhaustion, her name spilled from his lips: Naima, Naima, Naima.
The date for his return ticket passed, his visa expired, his malaria medication ran out. He wrote the museum to beg a month of unpaid leave. The Long Rains came: violent showers followed by choking humidity, steam in the streets, rainbows on the mountains. Sometimes a deluge swept goats into the river by his hotel. From his balcony Ward would watch them drift past, speeding between the banks, paddling hard to keep their noses above the water, and he felt sometimes that he was like those goats, swept up in circumstances beyond his control, swimming hard against the current, churning with silent desperation. Maybe living was no more than getting swept over a riverbed and eventually out to sea, no choices to make, only the vast, formless ocean ahead, the frothing waves, the lightless tomb of its depths.
He began to long for home, the steady seasons, the mild air, the ordinariness of the land. As his truck wound down through the hills, alone and after midnight, he’d gaze westward where the hills sloped a bit lower and imagine that Ohio lay just over the next ridge. His house was there, his bookshelves and his Buick; he imagined the refrigerator stocked with cheese and eggs and cold milk, daffodils standing primly in their beds. He was tired of sleeping in mosquito nets, tired of brown shower-water, tired of eating boiled maize in silence with Naima’s mother and father. Although he had been in Africa only five months he could feel himself becoming saturated with fatigue; his heart was moldering, crumbling. The sun broiling overhead and the fire inside his chest—it was too much; he was going to burn up.
Then April: the wettest days. The museum sent a telegram to the hotel. They had been unable to replace him and wanted him back. They offered a promotion to curator and a pay raise. To accept he would have to report by the first of June.
Two months. He began to run. The sky was a furnace, the sun was blazing and white, but he ran as much as his body could stand, staggering up hills, lunging back to the hotel. At first he made it only a few miles before the heat bowed him under. The people along the roads stared unabashedly, this curiosity, this big mzungu gasping through the streets. But as he strengthened they soon lost interest—a few even clapped him on. By the end of April he could run ten, then fifteen, then twenty kilometers. His skin grew darker, his muscles leaner.
Every day he sent a driver into the mountains with a gift: desiccated moths, fossilized corals, a blue jar with eight tiny medusae floating inside. Three swallowtail butterflies pinned to velvet in a small plastic case. Returning to his hotel, his heart sounding evenly in his chest, Ward began to feel the glimmers of something burgeoning inside, a strange and bottomless strength emerging from the pit of him. Flesh fell from his body. His appetite was endless. By the middle of May he could run and keep running and felt, suddenly one morning, moving out past the basket merchants and the clay pits south of town, the vast pan of the sea glittering before him and the blue smoke of charcoal fires hanging above the beaches, that he could run forever.
It wasn’t until late May that Ward drove north once more, across the Pangani, up the intricate, rutted roads, above the plantations, and into the rainforest. His legs crackled with a new energy—she would not get away this time. She met him at the door, breathless: he had brought his last gift. He stood trembling with his fists balled at his sides and watched her unwrap the silver ribbon from the box. Inside was a living monarch butterfly. It danced from between her hands and began to wander through the house.
It was sent here from the museum in a cocoon, Ward said, watching it bump against the ceiling. It must have just emerged. Naima was looking at him.
You look different, she said. You’ve changed.
All through dinner her attention passed over his face, his arms, the veins on the backs of hands. She lit a paraffin candle on the table and a twisting reflection of the flame stood twinned in her eyes.
I’ve come, he announced, to ask you to come home with me and be my wife.
Before he could stand she was past him and he charged after her, knocking over his chair, running beneath the eucalyptus, pounding up the trails. The night was dark and moonless, but he had become more agile and felt that new strength singing in his legs. He bounded past trunks, hurdled vines, spun down the path. Within twenty minutes he was deeper into the forest than he had ever been, climbing a steep trail after her. She was wearing a white dress and he kept his eye on it as he charged forward.
He chased her through the trees, into the bamboo above the trees, and eventually above the bamboo into an open woodland where sedge and tussock and heather grew in lumps among huge flat stones and bizarre tall plants like needled cabbages stood in the dimness swaying on stalks. Several times he came to a fork in the path and had to choose which way to go. Up ahead, every few minutes, he would glimpse her, springing forward. She was so fast—he had forgotten how fast.
He tracked her through a field of boulders, then a long swath of mud. He ran in her footprints, matching her strides. His lungs howled; blood thumped in his ears. Her tracks took him to a ridge, past a series of tall boulders and to the edge of a bluff. He stopped. Just below the horizon the ocean sprawled, reflecting back a dizzying smear of stars. He gazed all around him, hoping for a glimpse of white, the river of her body swinging in the night. But she was nowhere. He had lost her: it was a dead end—had he, despite all his confidence, taken the wrong trail? He pivoted, retreated, reapproached the cliff’s edge. He was certain he’d seen her dress flit between the boulders on which his hands now rested. And there were her tracks in the mud. Behind was the way he had come. Ahead waited what looked like nothing, space, a spiral of constellations reflected and real, and the hiss and splash of water on rocks somewhere far below.
A star fell from the sky; then another. Blood ticked in his ears. He leaned over the precipice, and although he could see nothing but those distant pinholes in the darkness, he felt a confidence, a resolution, and closed his eyes and stepped forward.
Years later he would look back and wonder: the footprints, the white dress—were these ways she revealed herself to him, ways she allowed him to catch her? Was he chasing her as a predator chases prey, or was he baited forward—was he the prey? Did he drive her off the cliff or did she lure him from its edge?
His fall took forever, too long, but then there was the smack of water beneath his shoes and on the bottoms of his forearms, and he was underwater, and back up, alive, gasping. From the mild current that flowed around him he knew he was in a river. The walls of a gorge lifted up around him. The river floated him to a gravel bar. He sat, half in the water, arms stinging, and tried to recover his breath.
She was standing on the far bank. Her skin was as dark as the river, darker even, and as she came toward him it seemed that her lower body dissolved and became part of the river itself. When she reached him she held out a hand and he took it. Though her hand was hot he could feel it tremble. Swallows drew loops above them; a crane, hunting minnows along the far bank, paused, its beak poised, one foot held above the water.
What a risk she was taking—what a fabulous, miraculous risk. Even Ward could see that she was the one stepping off a cliff’s edge, plunging through the darkness. She looked over his head, at the stars rioting in the sky. Yes, she said.
The next Sunday they were married by a priest in Lushoto.
A week in her parents’ home: he slept in her room; they hardly spoke; they filled their frames of vision with each other. Ward could not bear to have her out of his sight: he wanted to follow her to the outhouse, wanted to help her dress. Naima found herself trembling nearly all the time. She threw herself into him; she was hurtling down the path she had chosen as quickly as her body would carry her. On the airplane they held hands. He watched the green and furrowed hills sliding far below and felt vaguely triumphant.
In her window seat Naima tried to imagine herself hurtling through the sky, not cramped into this tunnel with strangers but really flying, arms stretched out, rafts of clouds scrolling by. She clenched her eyes, balled her fists; the vision would not come.
When Naima was ten she invented a game and called it Mkondo. Mkondo was this: from the network of trails behind her parents’ home, she’d choose a path she’d never traveled and follow it until it ended. When she reached the end she had to take one step farther. Sometimes this meant merely stepping over nettles or crawling through a net of vines. Other times paths edged their way into gorges and dropped to a river—the brown and quiet Pangani or some nameless creek slashing past—and she would hitch her khanga to her thighs and, trembling, wade in. Of if, in the final pinch of a ravine, a trail dead-ended in a grove of cedar trees, she’d clamber up twenty feet to a branch, then take her step forward.
Her favorites were the trails that climbed high into the mountains, winding through fields of giant heather and tussock to terminate at some crumbling pinnacle, and she would stand at the end of the trail and lift her foot. Far off, above the trees nodding their heads in the wind, above the flat and dusty plains, clumps of clouds would soar in from the horizon. She’d lean into the pulsing gulf of air, with her foot poised over nothing, and space would flood around her, a vertigo against which she held back in blissful panic, fighting an urge she had, always, to continue on, to throw herself forward.
She’d run until she couldn’t feel her legs moving beneath her, until past and future seemed to dissolve and there was only Naima—all the attention of the seething, tossing forest on her— and she’d feel a reckless urgency to accelerate, to run beneath the clouds and feel her core blaze into life; some rare nights, as she neared the end of a trail, she felt the shed of her body slip away, and for one electrifying moment she became a ray of light, speeding upward. It wasn’t dissatisfaction as much as curiosity; it wasn’t a fear of stasis as much as a need for movement. But those things—fear and dissatisfaction—were there too. She could not sit still; she hated picking tea; she dreaded school.
As Naima grew older she watched friends marry friends; young men assumed their father’s jobs; young women became versions of their mothers. No one, it seemed, left the places they lived, the roads they traveled. At nineteen, at twenty-two, she was still racing through the forests, crawling through brambles, scrambling up riverbanks. Children called her mwendawazimu; the tea pickers treated her as an outsider. By then Mkondo had become more than a game; it was the one way she could be certain she was alive.
Then Ward had arrived. He was different, significant; he spoke of places she had only dreamed of, he carried himself with a delicacy she had not seen before. (Ward stepping out of his truck, staring shyly at his feet, scraping at a fleck of clay on his shirt with a fingernail.) The gifts, the attention, the promise of something different, something glamorous—all these things attracted her. But it was not until he had leapt after her into the river that she was convinced. It was dark; he easily might have turned back.
On the plane she opened her eyes. This, she thought, this marriage, this one-way ticket to another continent, was just another round of Mkondo; it was only a matter of steeling yourself and taking that extra, final step.
Ohio: bleak weather impended over the city like a shroud. Curtains of haze washed out the light; helicopters shuttled endlessly overhead; buses groaned through the streets like dying beasts. In Ward’s neighborhood the houses were built within a foot of each other—Naima could lift a screen and reach into the neighbors’ kitchen.
For those first months she threw herself so ardently into Ward that she managed to outrun her disappointment. It was love, the most desperate kind. She spent her afternoons glancing at the clock once a minute, waiting for the moment his bus would let him off at the end of the block, the sound of his keys at the door. Evenings they ran through the streets, dodging lampposts, hurdling newspaper boxes. Sometimes they stayed up until dawn talking; when Monday morning came—too soon—Naima wanted to hammer the door shut, bury his keys, pin him against the hallway floor.
Although the museum was not what she expected—cracked granite staircases, mounted mammals and bones on display, dioramas where plastic-eyed cavemen bent over plaster cookfires— she could see why Ward had such ambition for it. It was a musty, wistful place; a vision of what that country must once have been. They sat on the roof at night and watched traffic slug through the streets; they picnicked inside the fossilized rib cage of a brontosaur. In a marble hall the walls were covered with almost fifty thousand pinned butterflies, species from every region on earth. The colors on their wings took her breath away: dazzling blue halos, tiger stripes, false eyes. Ward beamed, named them one by one. It was his favorite place. Even later, after he had been promoted several times, he would return to the hall of butterflies to dust them off, straighten their labels, inspect new additions.
But the more time she spent there the more the museum unnerved her. Nothing grew, nothing lived. Even the light seemed dead, falling from naked bulbs screwed into the ceilings. The people there obsessed over names and classifications of things, as if the first orange-winged butterfly had emerged from its cocoon named Anthocharis cardamines, as if the essence of ferns was explained by a dried specimen tacked to posterboard and labeled Dennstaedtiaceae. The curators had taken Ward’s prehistoric bird, taped an index card to it, and locked it in a glass cube. What kind of natural history was that? She wanted to haul in barrows of earth and dump them on the floor. See this grub? she’d announce, shaking one at the old guard, at the visiting class of first-graders. See these slugs? This is natural history. This is what you come from.
Traffic, billboards, sirens, a stranger’s unwillingness to look directly at her: these were not things she had expected, not things she could have prepared herself for. The leaves of trees—the few trees she could find—were stained with soot from the mills. The markets were lifeless and sterile: meat came packaged in plastic and she had to tear it open in the aisle to smell it. The neighbors pretended not to stare when she did laundry in the yard. You need something, she told herself, wringing Ward’s shirts over the lawn. You need something or you are not going to make it here.
Ward watched Naima drift through the house as if searching for something she’d lost; sometimes she complained of strange illnesses: invisible clamps around her throat, thick-headedness, rubbery insides. Once he brought her to dinner at an acquaintance’s house, a Kenyan professor at the university. It will do you good, Ward told her. The professor’s wife cooked chapatis, murmured hymns in Swahili. But Naima sat sullenly at the table and gazed outside. After dinner, when they took tea in the parlor, she stayed in the kitchen and sat on the floor, whispering to the housecat.
At night Ward tossed in self-loathing: how, he wondered, can you want something so badly, finally get it, and yet wind up discontented? And how can it happen so quickly? When he finally could sink into sleep his dreams boiled with faceless devils; he woke—gasping—with their talons on his windpipe.
Ward was changing too, or perhaps just reverting to something he had been before, easing back to a more familiar road. After only six months in Ohio, Naima could see the flush in his neck fade, the definition of his muscles wilt. She watched him tangle himself in the trappings of work: he’d return home at eight or nine, sheepish and apologetic. He brought paperwork home on weekends; he was placed in charge of museum publications, then membership management. I love you, Naima, he’d say, standing in the doorway to his study. But already he was not the same person who had arrived at her parents’ door like a stag in rut, breathing hard, trembling with life.
They made love carefully, and in silence. Nothing ever came of it. Are you okay? he’d say afterward, panting, suddenly afraid to touch her, as if she were a flower he’d torn the petals from—an accident, too late. Are you okay?
Her first February the weather stayed overcast every day all day. She felt the dead weight of snow on the roof; she rolled over each morning, lifted the curtain and groaned to see it gray again, never any sun, never any movement to the air. A mile away the flat and dismal towers of downtown stood against the sky like huge prisons. Buses roared through the slush.
She had come to Ohio; she had taken that final, extra step. Now what? she thought. Now what am I supposed to do? Turn back? By August—she had been there a year—she was sobbing at night. The Ohio sky had become a tangible weight, bending the stalk of her neck, loading down her shoulders. She slumped through the hours. Ward, anxious to try anything, drove her out of the city: barns on hills, threshers in fields. They sat on a friend’s porch and ate fresh corn slathered in butter and pepper. She asked, What are those white boxes over there?
Bees. So all winter she hammered together frames in the basement and in April bought a queen and a three-pound package of workers from a farm supply store and set up a hive in Ward’s backyard. Each evening, with a canvas veil over her head, lulling the bees with smoke from smoldering bunches of grass, she’d stand over the hive and watch it in all its industry, all its wildness. And she was happy. But the neighbors complained—they had kids, they said, and some of the kids were allergic. The bees were infesting their forsythia bushes, their potted geraniums. A woman had bees coming through her air conditioner. The neighbors began leaving notes under Ward’s wiper blades, rude messages on the answering machine. Then: a threat of sabotage—How would your bees take to some DDT?—taped to a glass paperweight and hurled through the living room window. Two cops stood on the porch with their hats behind their backs. City ordinance, they said, no bees.
Ward offered to help her get rid of them but she refused. She had never driven a car. She stopped and started, nearly leveled two children on tricycles. Finally she stalled in a field off the interstate, opened the trunk and watched the bees spiral out, angry, confused, swarming. A dozen stung her: on the arms, a knee, an ear. She wept, hated herself for it.
She stuck bird feeders to the bedroom windows with suction cups, lured squirrels into the kitchen with tea biscuits. She studied ants as they navigated the front walk, watched them heave the desiccated bodies of beetles onto their shoulders and freight them through the forest of the lawn. But it was not enough—it was not wilderness, not exactly, not at all. Chickadees and pigeons, mice and chipmunks. Houseflies. Trips to the zoo to watch a pair of dirty zebras eat hay. This was a life, this was how people chose to live? Somewhere inside she could feel winds dying, the gales of her youth stifled. She was learning that in her life everything— health, happiness, even love—was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul. There were doldrums in her arteries, gray skies in her lungs. She heard a pulse inside her ear, a swishing cadence of blood and it was time, the steady marking of every moment as it sailed past, unrecoverable, lost forever. She mourned each one.
Winter—her third in Ohio—she crossed to Pennsylvania in Ward’s Buick and returned with a pair of immature red-tailed hawks, orphans bought from a chicken farmer who had shot their mother and advertised them in the paper. They were fully fledged, hot and bristling, with hooked beaks and sharp black talons and fire-colored eyes. She lashed leather rufters over their heads and tied them to a wooden block in the basement. Each morning she fed them cubes of raw chicken. As a kind of training she carried them around the house, hooded, perched on a heavily gloved wrist, stroking their wings with a feather and talking to them.
The hawks were full of hate. At night wild cries reverberated from the basement. Naima would wake and experience the strange sensation that the world had inverted—the sky arched beneath her, the hawks were circling in the basement, shouting up. She lay in bed and listened. Then, all too familiar, the phone would ring: the neighbors wondered why it sounded like children were shrieking in Ward’s cellar.
She was learning: wildness was not something she could make or something she could bring to her, it had to be there on its own, a miracle she had to be lucky enough to happen across, traveling one day along a path and arriving at its end. She went to the birds each night. She carried them to opposite ends of the basement, stroked them with the feather and talked to them in Swahili, in Chagga. But still they squalled. Can’t you just muzzle them? Ward would shout from his study. Until they outgrow this? But hatred was not something they would outgrow, it was in them; she could see it brimming behind their eyes.
After a week of this, the neighbors calling and the police summoned twice to the front step, Ward sat her down. Naima, he said, the police are going to take the hawks away. I’m sorry.
Let them come, she said. But that night she carried one of the birds to the backyard, removed its hood, and set it free. It flapped clumsily into the air, trying its wings, and settled onto the gable. There it began to screech, sharply and regularly, like a siren. It hammered at the roof with its beak, sending scraps of shingle into the air; it dropped to the front porch and threw itself at the front window. Then it perched on the mailbox and resumed screaming. Naima ran around to the front, thrilled, breathless.
Five minutes later the police were shining flashlights in the windows. Ward stood on the sidewalk in his sweatpants, shaking his head, gesturing at the screeching hawk, which was now perched on the gutter. Porch lights up and down the block switched on. Two men in coveralls pulled their truck onto the lawn and tried to snare the hawk with long-poled nets. It screamed at them, dive-bombed their heads. Finally, at the peak of the noise, sirens wailing, men shouting and the bird crying savagely at them all, there was a gunshot, an explosion of feathers, and afterward, a silence. A sheepish cop reholstered his handgun. What was left of the bird fell in a lump behind the hedges. Fragments of feather drifted up, spinning into the darkness.
She waited until the police were gone and the neighbors’ lights had gone out. Then she went downstairs, took the other hawk and set it free in the backyard. It lifted drunkenly into the sky and vanished over the city. She stood in the yard, listening, watching the spot in the haze where she had last seen it, a black speck against a field of gray.
It has to stop, Ward said. What will you haul in here next? A crocodile? An elephant? He shook his head, circled his wide arms around her. In just three years his body had become soft enough to repulse her. Why not go to college? he’d say. You could walk to campus. But when she imagined college she thought of her dreary days in the schoolhouse in Lushoto, the heat of classrooms, the impatience of mathematics, bland two-dimensional maps pinned to walls. Green for land, blue for water, stars for capital cities. Schoolmasters obsessed with naming things that had existed unnamed for a million years.
Every day she went to bed early and slept late. She yawned: huge, widemouthed yawns that seemed to Ward not so much yawns as noiseless screams. Once, after Ward left for work, she climbed onto the first city bus that stopped and rode it until the driver announced last stop; she found herself at the airport. She wandered the terminal, watched the names of cities shuffle up and down the monitors: Denver, Tucson, Boston. With Ward’s credit card she bought a ticket to Miami, folded it into her pocket and listened for the boarding calls. Twice she walked to the jetway but balked, turned around. On the bus back she found herself crying. Had she forgotten how to take that extra step? How had it happened so quickly?
She complained about the humidity in the summer and the cold in the winter. She claimed illness when Ward offered to take her to dinner; he’d tell her something about the museum and she’d look away, not even pretending to listen. Without thinking about it she referred to the house—still, after four years—as his house. It’s our house, Naima, he’d insist, thumping the wall with his fist, our kitchen. Our spice rack. He began to wonder if she’d leave; he became certain he’d wake one day and find her gone, a note on the mantel, a suitcase missing from the closet.
He’d come home late and meet her on the stairs. I had a lot of work, he’d say. And she’d go past him, out into the night, moving in the opposite direction.
In his office he took a notepad from a drawer and wrote: I see now that I cannot give you what you need. You need movement and life and things I can’t even guess at. I am an ordinary man with an ordinary life. If you have to leave me to find the things you need, I understand. No one who has ever seen you run beneath the trees or hang on to the hood of his truck could ever again be entirely happy without you, but I could try. I could live, anyway.
He signed the page, folded it, and stowed it in his pocket.
The twining of their lives: born on different halves of the world; brought together by chance and curiosity; leveraged apart by the incompatibility of their respective landscapes. While Ward was sitting on the bus, heading home, his letter in his pocket, another letter, tucked into the guts of an airplane, shuttled from truck to truck, hand to hand, was waiting in their Ohio mailbox: a letter from Tanzania, from the brother of Naima’s father. Naima brought it in, set it on the counter and stared at it. When Ward came home he found her in the basement, on the floor, cocooned in an afghan.
He waved a finger in front of her eyes, brought her tea that she did not drink. He pried the letter from her fist and read it. Her parents had died together, when a section of the road to Tanga gave way in a rush of mud, rolling the truck into a gorge. She had already missed the burial by a week but Ward offered to send her anyway: he knelt before her and asked if she’d like him to make arrangements. No answer. He laid his hands on her cheeks and raised her head; when he released it, it fell back onto her chest.
He slept beside her in his shirt and tie on the concrete floor. In the morning he took the letter he had written her and shredded it. Then he carried her to the car and drove her to the county hospital. A nurse wheeled her to a room and plugged a tube into her arm. She’d be okay, the nurse said, they would help her.
But this was not the kind of help she needed: white walls, fluorescent lights, the smells of sickness and disease slinking through the halls. Twice a day they pushed pills into her mouth. She drifted through the hours; her pulse ticked slowly through her head. How many days did she lie with the television burbling, her heart emptied, her senses dulled? She could see the white moons of faces rising and falling as people bent over her: a doctor, a nurse, Ward, always Ward. Her fingers found the metal railings of her bed; her nose brought the sterile smells of hospital food: instant potatoes, medicinal squash. The TV hummed incessantly. Her sleep was gray and dreamless. When she tried to remember her parents she could not. Soon Tanzania would be gone from her altogether—like her orphaned hawks she would know no home except where she was kept, hooded and tied, against her will. What next? Would they come in and shoot her?
Was it morning? Had she been there two weeks? She tore the tube from her arm, heaved her way out of bed and stumbled from the room. She could feel drugs in her body slowing her muscles, dumbing her reflexes. Her head felt like it was a glass globe resting precariously on her shoulders—one wrong movement and it would fall; it would take her the rest of her life to sweep up the pieces.
In the hall, amid rolling gurneys and hustling orderlies, she saw lines of tape on the floor fanning out like the paths of her youth. She picked one and tried to follow it. After some time— she could not say how long—a nurse was at her elbow, turning her, shepherding her back to her room.
They began locking her door. Peas for dinner; soup for lunch. She felt herself sliding away; the muscle of her heart had thinned and blood slopped around inside. Something deep and untrammeled within her had died, diseased somehow, trampled. How had it happened? Hadn’t she guarded it carefully? Hadn’t she secured it away in the center of her?
After the hospital—she could not say how many days she was locked in that room—Ward brought her home and installed her in a chair by the window. She watched buses, taxicabs, neighbors plodding back and forth with their heads down. An immense emptiness had settled inside her; her body was a desert, windless and dark. Africa could not have seemed farther away. Sometimes she wondered if it even existed, if her whole history was just some dream, some fable meant for children. Look where impulsiveness can get you, the storyteller would say, wagging his finger in the child’s eyes. Look what happens when you stray.
Spring passed, summer and fall. Naima did not get out of bed until noon or later. With the slow revolution of seasons only the tiniest memories—the squeaks of robin chicks begging worms from their mother, snow sifting through a streetlight—trickled back. They came to her as if through a thick wall of glass; their meanings were changed and they had lost their context, their edge, their wild savor. Even her dreams came back eventually, but these too were altered. She dreamed a train of camels sauntering through a woodland, orange clouds looming over the canopy of a forest, but in these scenes she was nowhere to be found—she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward’s museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren’t allowed to touch.
Some mornings, watching from the bed as Ward tied his tie, the tail of his shirt hanging over the plump backs of his thighs, she felt resentment foam up from some rotting place within her and she’d turn onto her stomach and hate him for hounding her through the rainforest, for leaping from the rim of that cliff. Everything had unraveled between them: Ward had given up trying to reach her and she had given up allowing herself to be reached. She had been in Ohio five years but it felt like fifty.
Evening. She was squatting on the back steps, half asleep, when a line of geese skimmed over the gable of the house. They passed so low she could see the definition of their feathers, the smooth black curves of their bills, the simultaneous, coordinated blink of their eyes. She felt the sudden power of their wings as the air they displaced shifted over her. They moved steadily toward the horizon, bleating, alternating leaders. She watched until they were gone and then watched the spot they had disappeared into and wondered: What avenue did they follow? What strange and hidden switch in their heads was thrown each winter, what sent them shuttling down the same invisible pathways to the same southern waters? How glorious the sky was, she thought, and how unknowable. Long after they were gone she trained her eyes sky-ward, waiting, hoping.
It was 1989; she was thirty-one years old. Ward was eating a cupcake—a stalactite of frosting hung from his bottom lip. She went in and stood before him. Okay, she said. I want to go to college.
He stopped chewing. Well, he said. All right then.
In a gymnasium students milled between stalls labeled Government, Anthropology, Chemistry. One booth—decorated with glossy photographs—caught her eye. A volcano ringed with snow. The cracked seat of a chair. A series of photos of a bullet exiting an apple. She studied the images, filled out paperwork: Photography 100, Introduction to the Camera. Ward had an old Nikon 630 in the basement and she dusted it off and brought it to the first class.
That will never do, her instructor said. It is all I have, she said. He fiddled with the loading door, explained how light would seep in and spoil her photos.
I can hold it shut, she said. Or I’ll tape it. Please. Tears sprung to her eyes.
Well, the instructor said, we’ll see what we can do.
Their second day he led the students onto the campus. We’re snapping a few exposures here, he called. Don’t burn your film. Focus on the structures, people.
The students fanned out, aiming their lenses at the cornerstones of buildings, the chiseled end of a handrail, the domed cap of a fire hydrant. Naima walked to a grizzled, bent oak leaning out of a triangle of lawn between sidewalks. Her camera was taped shut with electrical tape. It contained twenty-four exposures. She hardly understood what that meant, to have twenty-four exposures in her machine. F-stop, ASA, depth of field, all this meant nothing. But she leaned forward, pointed the lens up, where the leafless branches shifted against the sky, and waited. The cloud cover was thick but she could see a rift forming. She waited. In ten minutes the clouds parted gently, a thin ray of light nudged through, illuminating the oak, and she made her exposure.
Two days later, in the darkroom, she watched the instructor unclip the black coil of her negatives from the line where they were drying. He nodded and handed the strip to her. She raised them as he had done, to the bulb, and suddenly, seeing the rendered image of what she had captured only days before—oak branches bloomed over with sun, a fracture in the haze beyond— she felt a darkness tear away from her eyes. Shivers ran down her arms; joy founted up. It was rapture, the oldest feeling, a sensation like rising from the thick canopy of forest and turning, looking out over the treetops, seeing the world again, for the first time.
That night she could not sleep. She burned. She was three hours early for the next class.
They made contact sheets, then prints. In the darkroom she watched the developing bath intently, waiting for the grain of her photo to emerge on the paper—it floated in, first faint, then gray, then fully there, and it struck her as the most beautiful magic she’d ever seen. Developer, stop-bath, fixer. So simple. She thought: I was made and set here to give voice to this.
After class the instructor called her over. He leaned over the prints and pointed out how she’d trapped a telephone wire in this frame, how she could have extended that exposure a bit longer. Good, though, he said, a good first set. But it’s a bit wrong, too. Your camera lets light in—can you see here how the fringe is washed out? And here the tree looks flat; there is no background, no point of reference. He took his glasses off and leaned back, pontificating now. How to render three dimensions in two, the world in planar spaces. It’s the central challenge for every artist, Naima.
Naima stepped back, reexamined her photo. Artist? she thought. An artist?
Every day she went out and snapped pictures of clouds: altonimbus, cirrocumulus, the cross-hatching of contrails, a child’s balloon drifting over train tracks. She caught the skyline of the city reflected in the bottom of a cloud, two puff-ball cumulus drifting across the face of a puddle. A cerulean rhombus of sky mirrored in the eye of a dog, killed minutes earlier by a bus. She began to see the world in terms of angles of light; windows, bulbs, the sun, the stars. Ward would leave money for groceries on the counter but she’d spend it on film; she wandered into neighborhoods she’d never seen before; she squatted in someone’s front yard, motionless, for an hour, waiting for a thick raft of stratus clouds to rupture, to see if the light might saturate the thin spar of a spider’s web trussed between two blades of grass.
Again there were phone calls: we saw your wife squatting by a dead dog, Ward, taking pictures of it. She took pictures of our trash cans. She stood on the hood of your car for an hour, Ward, staring at the sky.
He tried talking to her. So Naima, he’d try, how’s class? Or: Are you being careful out there? He had been promoted again and spent nearly all of his time at benefits, on the phone, walking the museum with donors in tow. By then he and Naima were miles apart—their trails had diverged and were unrolling through different continents. She’d show Ward the exposures and he’d nod. You’re doing so great, he’d say and touch her on the back. I like this one, and he’d hold up a print she disliked, a patch of iridescence in a cirrus cloud drifting past the moon. She didn’t mind; the kindling of her soul had caught fire. Nothing could slow her. Let Ward and his neighbors turn their eyes down, she would turn her eyes to the skies. She alone would witness these orange and purple and blue and white world-travelers, these bossed and gilded shape-shifters that came scudding overhead. Each morning, stepping out the front door, she felt the hard, dark center of her flare up.
Photography 100 ended. She earned an A. In the fall she took two more photography courses: Contemporary Photography and Techniques of the Darkroom. One professor lavished praise and offered to direct an independent study, saying, I think it’s best if we let you continue down this path you’re on. And Naima was on a path, she could sense it stretching out in front of her. She clicked and clicked. By the end of the semester she had won a student prize for her photo of the dead dog; people she had never seen before passed her in the halls and wished her well. In January a coffee shop called to offer a hundred dollars for a print of her first photo, the oak branches washed in light. By summer her work was made part of a group exhibition at a small gallery. It’s her patience, a woman murmured. These photos remind you that each moment is here, then gone forever, that no two skies are ever the same. Another edged in to declare that Naima’s work was perfectly ethereal, a sublime expression of the intangible.
She left early, escaping past a tuxedoed waiter with a tray of spring rolls, and marched into the dying light to take photo -graphs: a wedge of sunset through a bridge buttress; the spinning rosette of light left by the moon as it eased behind a building.
Late at night—it was April 1992—she felt that old feeling, the exhilaration of approaching a trail’s end at a sprint. She stood on the marble steps of the Natural History Museum and studied the sky. It had rained during the afternoon and now the starlight fell cleanly through the air. The light of galaxies bathed her neck and shoulders, lifted the tide of blood in her heart—the sky was only yards deep. She could reach through it and seize the frigid center, set suns swaying like tiny droplets of mercury. Deep and shallow: the sky could be so many things.
Ward was in the hall of butterflies, unpacking a box filled with dead specimens. It had been packed poorly and many of the wings were torn, their powdery designs smeared. He was lifting them out and piecing them together on the floor. She shook him by his shoulder and said, I’m leaving. I’m going home. To Africa.
He leaned back but did not meet her eyes. When?
Now.
Wait until tomorrow.
She shook her head.
How will you get there?
I’ll fly. Already she was turning, moving out of the hall, the soft sounds of her footfalls fading into silence. Although he knew she meant by airplane, later that night, alone in their bed, Ward couldn’t help but imagine her spreading her arms, opening her hands, and gracefully, easily, lifting her body over the plains and hills, toward the ocean.
A photograph—impossible towers of cumulonimbus banked against the horizon, livid with lightning—came to Ward in the mail. He shook the envelope but she’d sent only the photo. The next week another arrived: a lone rhinoceros silhouetted on the horizon, the trails of two falling stars intersecting above it. She didn’t write a word, didn’t sign her name. But the photos kept coming, two a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Between them yawned Ward’s life.
He sold his house, sold the furniture and bought a condo in the center of the city. He spent his weekends buying things: a gigantic television, two tile murals for the bathroom walls. He redecorated his office: rare seashells on the windowsill, Spanish leather stretched over the desktop. He became especially good at his job. Over paella, over maguro and gyoza, he could get nearly anyone to donate to the museum. He learned how to make himself invisible, a listener who spoke only when the person he was courting needed reassurance or time to compose what to say next. He tweaked their consciences by describing children pouring into the museum, thrilled them by showing animated footage of digitized dinosaurs on the museum’s movie screen. His finale always involved a line like: We offer children the world. And they would clap him on the shoulder and say, Why not, Mr. Beach. Why not.
He did his best to see that the museum evolved. People wanted interactive exhibits, complicated robotics, miniature reproductions of Brazilian forests. He got to work before everybody else and stayed until everything had closed. He arranged to have a simulated ice age occur every forty-five minutes in a room off the lobby. He had a miniature savannah built, complete with sunning hippopotami, swaying acacias, a three-inch zebra being feasted on by a pride of tiny, meticulously savage lionesses. But still he was mourning, and something in his face gave it away.
How Ward Beach suffers so quietly, his neighbors said, the museum volunteers said. He should find someone new, they said. Someone a little more grounded. Someone with his taste.
He grew corn, tomatoes, snap peas. He sat by the window in a café and read the paper, smiled at the waitress as she set down his change. And every few weeks the envelopes came: nimbus clouds reflected in the wet pawprint of a lion; squall lines warping over the summit of Kilimanjaro.
Another year passed. He dreamed of her. He dreamed she’d sprouted huge and glorious butterfly wings and circled the globe with them, photographing volcanic clouds rising from a Hawaiian caldera, tufts of smoke from bombs dropped over Iraq, the warped, diaphanous sheets of auroras unfurling over Greenland. He dreamed of catching her as she flew through a forest; his arms were great butterfly nets; just as he held them above her, about to close the mouths of the nets over her, he woke, his throat closing, and had to lean gasping over the bed.
Sometimes, on his way home, walking through the empty museum, the heels of his shoes clicking over the floors, Ward would pass the fossilized bird he had sent back from Tanzania almost twenty years before. Its bones, caught as they were in the limestone—the curves and needles of its winglike arms, the jacket of its ribs—were crumpled; its neck was miserably bent; it had died broken in pain. What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states.
In his mail an envelope with a Tanzanian postmark arrived, the first in months. Happy Birthday, it said, scribbled in her lilting, girlish cursive. It was his birthday, a few days away. Inside was a photograph of dark, rich grass, deep in a gorge, bisected by a river, the flat panel of water shimmering with stars. He held it under his desk lamp. The grass, the curve of the riverbank—it seemed familiar.
He saw: it was their place, the stretch of river he had plunged into from a cliffside, where she had come to him, almost dissolving into the water. He withdrew the print from the light and set it facedown, and wept.
What did he regret most? Their chance meeting on the road, her decision to leap onto the hood of his truck? His decision to bring her to Ohio? Letting her go? Letting himself go?
He didn’t have her address, a phone number, anything. Twice on the plane he got up and walked to the lavatory to look at himself in the mirror. Do you know what you’re doing? he asked aloud. Are you crazy? In his seat he drank vodka like water. Far below his window the clouds revealed nothing.
He was forty-seven years old and he had walked into the chief curator’s office and given his two weeks’. He’d bought his ticket, carefully packed his clothes. These were all cliff edges off which he’d had to step.
In the wet air of Dar es Salaam he felt old memories come springing back: the familiar pattern on a woman’s khanga, the smell of drying cloves, the lopsided face of an amputee holding out her palm for coins. His first morning the sight of his shadow standing sharp and black against the hotel wall caused déjà vu.
The sensation stayed with him on the drive up the coast toward Tanga. The green and brown pan of the Maasai Steppe, punctuated here and there with thin spires of smoke; the sight of two dhows sailing out to Zanzibar: he felt he had seen all these things before, as if here he was, twenty years younger, driving up this road for the first time with a Land Rover full of shovels and sifting pans and chisels.
Some things had changed: there was a hotel in Lushoto now with a menu in English, and hawkers out front who offered glamorous safaris at ridiculous prices. The Usambaras had changed too: hundreds more terraced plantations had been cut into the hillsides; antennas stood blinking on ridgelines. But these changes—cellular phones and taxi-vans and cheeseburgers on a menu—didn’t matter. After all, he considered, wasn’t this the land where the first thick-browed humans walked, under these same brooding mountains, with these same winds bringing them smells of rain, of drought? He read in a guidebook that humans hadn’t witnessed the great migration of wildebeest and zebra up the Serengeti until 1900. A hundred years—in Ward’s field, a century was a finger-snap. What change could a hundred years bring? What small fraction of time was that for the animals who had been charging up and down that plain, teaching their young how to live, forever?
He slept deeply and peacefully and for the first time in years did not wake from a dream with something clenched around his throat. He drank coffee on the porch of his hotel and chewed a scone before setting off. He thought he would find her parents’ house easily—how many times had he made that drive: fifty?— but the roads were changed, wider and graded; he would round a bend and think he knew where he was but the road would suddenly descend when it was supposed to climb; he’d be at plantation gates when he should have been at an intersection. Dead ends, turn-offs, U-turns.
After days of winding through the hills he began to ask anyone he saw about her parents, about her, if anyone knew of a place where a photographer might develop film. He asked tea pickers, tour guides, duka owners. A boy at the hotel desk said he mailed tourists’ film to an address in Dar to have it developed but that only white people dropped off rolls of film. An old woman told Ward in broken sentences that she remembered Naima’s parents but no one had lived in their home since they died many years ago. He bought the woman lunch and plied her with questions. Do you remember where they lived? Can you tell me how to drive there? She shrugged and waved vaguely at the mountains. The only way to find something, she said, is to lose it first.
He had not expected this, the waiting and wandering, the hot hours in a rented car. He began to park at road ends and follow footpaths into the fields. Blisters ballooned on his heels; he sweated through his shirts. But he knew this was the way to find her: he would have to walk the tracks that wound over the mountains. He would have to find a way to get his path to cross hers— she would not leave footprints this time, or wear a white dress, or give herself away.
Each morning he set forth and tried to get himself lost. He fashioned a walking stick, bought a machete, tried to ignore trail-side signs in Swahili that might have warned of buffalo gorings or the prosecution of trespassers. Welts appeared on his calves, insect bites studded his forearms. His clothes shredded and tore; he hacked the sleeves off a coat and wore it through the woods like a postapocalyptic vest.
After three weeks of day hikes he found himself on a thin track beneath cedars. It was nearly dark and he was completely lost. The track had taken him through so many turns he could not say which way was north or south; uphill might lead him out of the mountains or farther into them; he had no compass, no map. Impossible clusters of vines hung in nets from the trees. Unseen birds screamed at him from the canopy. He hiked on, laboring over the tight, overgrown trail.
Soon it was dark and the sounds of night rose up around him. He took his headlamp from his pack and strapped it over his hat. Rain was misting over the leaves—large drops fell into the sub-story and dampened his shoulders. Before long he realized he’d lost the trail. He aimed his light in every direction—it revealed rotting logs, a shooting vine threaded around a trunk, great beards of moss hanging from the branches. A giant colony of ants was on the move, coursing along a column, overtaking a log.
He was almost fifty years old, unemployed, separated from his wife, lost in the mountains of Tanzania. In the thin beam of his light he watched a water droplet slide into the body of a red flower. He thought about how in a few days its petals would fall to the forest floor and crumple, and wither, and eventually be incorporated into something else, tree bark, a berry, energy rifling through the limbs of a salamander. He plucked the flower from its stem, wrapped it carefully in a bandanna and stowed it in the top of his pack.
He walked all that night, feeling his way, falling and staggering to his feet. When dawn came he could have been in the same place he’d been during the night—he had no way to know. Rain washed through the gaps in the canopy. He was drenched. Nearly everything he’d learned during his life was suddenly and perfectly useless. To walk, to find water, to look for a trail—these were the only ambitions that mattered. Part of him knew he should have been afraid. Part of him said, You do not belong in this place, you will die here.
What had he been doing these past years? His memory burrowed backward: the feel of his leather desktop, the clink of silver on china, wine lists at balconied restaurants—this gave way to his youth, clay breaking thickly in his hands, triumph at finding a rare crinoid embedded in stone, fish vertebrae fossilized in a fragment of slate. He remembered seeing goats swept up in a deluge, bawling at the riverbanks. Hadn’t he learned anything, then? Why hadn’t that raw energy, that terrific confidence he felt leaping from the edge of a cliff, stayed with him? What if he died here, in this forest, alone? What would become of his bones? Would they crumple and fold into the earth, preserved as a riddle for some other species, hacking one day through stone, to solve? He hadn’t done enough with his life. He hadn’t seen that what he had in common with the world—with the trunks of trees and the marching columns of ants and green shoots corkscrewing up from the mud—was life: the first light that sent every living thing paddling forth into the world every day.
He wouldn’t die—he couldn’t. He was, only now, remembering how to live. Something in him wanted to sing out, wanted to shout: I’m lost completely, lost utterly. The shingling, coarse bark of a tree, raindrops plunking on the leaves, the sound of a toad moaning a love song somewhere nearby: all of it seemed terribly beautiful to him.
A single white moth, huge, the size of his hand, wandered by, veering between the vines. Ward moved forward.
A path, the faintest trace of a trail, encroached on all sides, a narrow passage into the light. He found her parents’ house that night, stumbling through a long field of nettles. The house stood low and small, faintly illuminated and with smoke issuing from the chimney, a cottage out of a fairy tale. The walls were overgrown with vine and the tea fields had become wild, dark things, grown over with bougainvillea and thistle. But the place was tended to: there was a vegetable garden out back, fat pumpkins lolling in the soil and corn standing tall and tasseled on its stalks. The flames of two candles burned in a window. Behind the screen he saw a large oak table, wooden cabinets, a cluster of tomatoes on a countertop. He called her name but there was no reply.
In the dying light of his headlamp he saw that the tea nursery had been slathered over with mud, from top to bottom, like a giant anthill. There was a sign nailed to the door. Darkroom, it said, in Naima’s hand.
He dropped his pack and sat. He thought of her inside, lifting her negatives from one chemical bath to the next, raising them up and pinning them to a line to dry. All those moments, captured and doubled onto film, frozen, her own museum of natural history unfolding in front of her.
Before long the first hem of light lifted over the trees and he looked out over the knitted vine and thistle, across the dark plantations stretched out in neat, arcing rows, to where the first rays of light fell across the hills. He heard the sounds of her moving inside—the scrape of a shoe over the floor, the muffled splash of poured liquid. The huge, warped crown of the sun showed above the horizon. Maybe, he thought, the words will come to me. Maybe when she walks out that door I’ll know precisely what to say. Maybe I’ll say I’m sorry, or I understand, or Thank you for sending the photos. Maybe we’ll watch the light wash the hills together.
He reached into his pack and removed the flower, the delicate crumpled bell shape of its body, and held it carefully in his lap, waiting.