4.

Meet here in two hours. The boat for Jonestown leaves at five, Dot Luce-Jones instructs them as she parks outside the town hall, and though she isn’t as scary as her mom, Lenny still has every intention of obeying. He piles out of the van with Norm, Bruce, and Irving. Donna and Nikki, an auburn-haired white chick with mousy teeth, follow with sacks over their shoulders like Santa Claus.

‘The market is a couple of streets over.’ Donna points, then steps into the traffic with Nikki. Nikki is wearing Minnie’s rose-colored dress. It looked better on Minnie.

Cabs and buses honk as they shadow Donna and Nikki across the road. They pass a statue of Queen Victoria. A big wooden church, still smattered with Sunday worshippers, though it’s past lunchtime. Lenny’s stomach is clogged from the fatty soul-food lunch cooked up by the old ladies. When they enter the market and are hit with food smells, his stomach turns.

‘They got Coca-Cola here too! Hot damn,’ Norm notes enthusiastically.

Bruce mumbles something about wanting his Coke with rum and shuffles off. The chicks weave ahead with their sacks. Irving strides into the swell of bodies like a surfer without a board.

‘Five finger!’ A hand grabs Lenny’s arm. He instinctively looks at its five fingers. Then another set of fingers slip a slimy star-shaped fruit onto his palm. ‘Try.’

‘Oh, no. Thanks,’ Lenny tells the owner of the fingers, feeling rude in spite of his politeness, for she’s skinny and old and brown.

‘Five finger. Starfruit!’ the woman insists, making a twinkle-star motion.

‘Yeah, cool …’ Lenny nods and smiles. Tries to give the fruit back. She won’t let him.

‘Try.’ She pats her flat midriff; she’s wearing a sari. Lenny looks around, but even Norm is beyond reach, crowded up to a drink vendor. He gives in; pops the fruit. It’s firm yet oily, like a grape, tart to taste.

‘Good!’ she exclaims joyously. She casts around for more fruit. ‘Try, try …’

Again, Lenny refuses; again, she persists, feeding him tiny bananas, guava, breadfruit, laughing at him. Then she starts gathering fruit into a plastic bag. ‘Sorry, I can’t—’

‘Very good,’ the woman stresses. ‘Good for you.’

‘Yeah, just …’ Lenny shakes a stream of pennies from his wallet. ‘That’s all I have.’

Her expression grows taut, calculating. Wordlessly, she removes all but one starfruit from the bag, scrapes the change from his palm, waves him away.

Strange fruits. Fruit drinks. Flower drinks. Tree-bark drinks. Alien-esque vegetables. Mounds of spices like bright dirt. Hands dart at him. Women with black hair and nose studs smile at him, and he’s torn between smiling back and knowing he’s both broke and married. From afar, he sees Donna and Nikki negotiating with a toyseller, and his instinct is to avoid them. He smells something sweet, skunky, and is buoyed by a Pavlovian wave of euphoria.

He follows the scent to a stall, hung with beads, woven baskets. Two dreadlocked dudes with a glass pipe. They look at Lenny with unfazed dark eyes.

‘Yes, sah?’ says the younger one, a powerfully-built guy in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

‘Hey.’ Lenny looks around. ‘Cool store.’

‘It cool,’ Harley agrees, then looks at his pal, a fat guy in a Yankees cap and dashiki. They laugh. Yankees takes a hit.

‘Hey … smells good.’ Lenny signals at the smoke hopefully.

‘It good.’ Yankees passes the pipe on to Harley. They laugh again.

‘Is it … legal here?’ Lenny asks, wide-eyed.

‘We pay small fee, police don’t mind.’ Harley looks at him sidelong. ‘You want?’

‘I spent all my money,’ Lenny confesses, showing his starfruit. They laugh more.

‘Whereyoucomefrom, man?’ Yankees volleys with almost aggressive cheer.

‘California.’ Lenny watches the smoke curl. ‘I’m going to Jonestown. You know it?’

Both guys mmm, nod, don’t elaborate. Lenny looks at the beads: shells, seed pods, red-yellow-green. ‘That’s some nice jacket you wearin’, sah,’ Harley remarks.

‘Yeah?’ In fact, the jacket is new, chosen by the lady who does Dr. Lynden’s shopping.

‘Very nice. Made in America?’

‘Yeah.’ Lenny shrugs it off, shows the label. Passing the pipe to Yankees, Harley examines the stitched lettering, the little polo player.

‘Jacket like this, you won’t be needing in Jonestown … We keep this jacket. Okay?’

Lenny smiles. Yankees is already offering up the pipe.

It’s good weed. The best he’s had in years, which isn’t saying much, since it has been years. So many years, it’s almost like that first time in college, getting high with those guys from his Philosophy class who Marianne would later (not incorrectly) accuse him of spending too much time with. But Harley says, ‘We don’t smoke to get high like Americans. We smoke for meditation,’ and Lenny likes the sound of this, as he likes the sound of the beads playing through his fingers. He notices a purse with pretty woven patterns, and his heart swells, his mind strains longingly. Then a hand reaches through the beads to give Yankees a bowl of saltfish. Salt. Fish. Ocean.

‘I have to be on a boat …’ Lenny panics. ‘The boat leaves at five.’

Yankees checks his watch through a mouthful of saltfish. ‘Four-thirty only.’

Lenny stands; the floor reels like a boat’s deck. ‘Thanks … Nice to meet you … Peace.’

It’s anything but peaceful, finding his way back to the meeting point. Hooting traffic. A man in uniform he crosses the street to avoid. A black dog with an untethered eyeball. When the van screeches up beside him, his instinct is to shrink away.

‘Lenny! Get in!’ Dot orders, sounding a lot like her mom.

He gets in. It’s crowded. Both Norm and Bruce reek of liquor.

‘Irving isn’t with you?’ Nikki asks anxiously. ‘You didn’t see Irving anywhere?’

Lenny manages to shake his head. The girls hiss, ‘He’s gonna have to get the next boat out,’ and, ‘We’re in deep shit.’ Relieved, Lenny sits back.

Somehow, while Lenny is focused on camouflaging himself with the upholstery, they arrive at the port. The sky a hazy peach-scape, flung with white birds. Raw-edged shipping containers. Dock cats he longs to pet. The Rosaline is being packed with supplies.

On jelly-legs, he waits for the call to board, then does.

By nightfall, he’s puking his guts out.

Puking, and shitting, and when he isn’t puking or shitting, strung out in the moaning twilight of the deck. Lanterns turn faces Halloween-orange, fizzle out as new waves crash onboard. Someone comes by with waterproof jackets, and then, as the night wettens, life jackets.

Lenny wonders if this is how he’ll die.

He closes his eyes and tries to pretend he’s dead, but there’s too much going on, inside and outside. He’s unable to distinguish inside from outside, the churning of the ocean from his churning guts and mind. Drowned bodies. Woven purses. Minnie. Evelyn. Marianne, crying. The pool in the Berkeley Hills, with Marianne, with Evelyn, with his siblings, with the uniformed maids serving lemonade on ice. X-rays. More crying. His mother, Liesl, taking him to a Jewish ghetto in Salzburg and crying over aunts, cousins he knew nothing about. Gassed bodies. Liesl’s long cigarettes, curling with smoke. Patterns swirling, containing all the meaning in the world, if only he could hold still enough to see everything at once.

Maybe he sleeps. It’s a new day; someone brings rice. The TigerBeat girl, Daisy, teeters across the deck on coltish legs, leans over the edge, sweet-cheeked in tiny terry shorts, and throws up her rice.

Lenny throws up again. Someone brings water, clear but salty, or maybe it’s his lips that are salty. He sleeps, and dreams he’s a dying soldier — white sails, black sails.

He wakes. The Rosaline has moored, and people are rising. ‘Are we in Jonestown?’ he asks hopefully, but no; someone gives him a crate of rum to carry. Off the boat and into a village clearing, where Jorge Harrison from the boat crew is bartering with some locals. Lenny places the crate down. Brown girls with startlingly smooth, pretty faces peek out at him from behind shanties, and he looks at the red dirt rather than back at them, they’re so young. After a while, some men haul out slabs of meat, cut slices. The meat is smoky, fishy, surprising. A rum bottle is opened, and the village men smell the contents, taste, nod. An exchange is made.

‘Shark meat,’ Jorge explains, as they trek back with the meat on their shoulders. ‘We’re approaching the mouth of the river. The waters will be calmer from here.’

Lenny sleeps. He wakes, cotton-mouthed and foggy, to Coca-Cola waters, hanging vines, views like something out of Evelyn’s old National Geographic magazines. He wishes he was high.

Someone brings rice. ‘Mekong River, ’68,’ Bruce says, and Lenny nods, feels evasively respectful, like he always does when guys his age compare scars and locations.

Jorge walks around shirtless, back muscles glazed and rippling. Bruce takes off his shirt, too, lies supine and barrel-chested, dark skin dappled with greenish light. Even Norm, pasty-brown and flabby, strips off. Lenny follows. Jonestown, he thinks, and the thought feels like sunshine, like fanning feathers, like the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

When he next wakes, the river is a sludgy piss-yellow, his skin tight and itchy: sunburn. The old ladies are singing again — Deep River, My home is over Jordan — and others are joining in, and soon so’s Lenny, voice weak but happy, so happy to be here. Thatched roofs. Brown legs running. Smoke. ‘Port Kaituma: six miles from Jonestown.’ The Rosaline docks.

There’s a red flatbed truck, waiting. They pile on. Lenny stands looking over the edge, until it becomes clear there’s nothing to see, and the journey will be long.

He slumps down. Closes his eyes against the truck’s jolts, the metallic red thunking in his brain. Until a siren cuts the air, and a sign appears:

WELCOME TO JONESTOWN
PEOPLES TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT

Lenny is silent, gaping at the observation tower above the canopy. Everyone is. A silence that widens as the view does; fields, black workers in fields, an occasional red-tan white person. Then barns, cabins, small and spartan, huddled together. ‘V’ry nice,’ an old lady mumbles. Some army-green tents emerge and, in the distance, the pavilion. The truck churns to a stop.

They form a line outside a tent with their luggage. In line ahead of Lenny, Daisy is having her possessions rifled through, a tube of lipstick confiscated, her TigerBeat magazine — ‘Only good for toilet paper.’ Sister Regina comes around with a clipboard and starts telling people their assigned cabins; Single Males C-17 for Bruce, C-23 for Norm …

‘Sister, I think there’s a mistake?’ Norm panics. ‘I should be in a cabin with my wife?’

‘Who’s your wife?’

‘Renetta Coleman. Kids are Pauly, Vivienne, Irene—’

‘No “Renetta Coleman”.’ Regina frowns, adjusts her rimless glasses. ‘We’ve got a “Renetta Dixon” … Wife of Claudius Dixon. Mother of Paul, Vivienne, Irene, Louis.’

Norm turns whiter than Lenny’s ever seen a black man turn. ‘No … That can’t be …’

‘You can take it up with the Relationship Committee.’ Regina makes to move away. Norm reaches for her round brown shoulder, begins pleading. Her nostrils flare.

‘Mister, don’t you lay your hands on me. That ain’t my area, alright? Take it up with the Relationship Committee.’

Lenny figures Norm might cry, so he stares away; the green-black canopy, the dusty yellow sky. He feels nothing but blunt inside: blunt to the cruelty; blunt to the newness; blunt to the stinging, the salt, the dirt, the flies. That is, until he sees his ex-wife.

Walking alone, in drawstring pants and a lace-edged tank top; that same fast walk; hair in that same boring bun, flashing dark as plumage. Back in college, there were girls Lenny would see some days and those days felt improved, lucky somehow. With Evelyn, the feeling was strongest. It’s still strong; a flight of rare birds in his chest, a clear blue wonder.

Lenny stares at his ex-wife.

She notices him staring, and all the beauty flies from her face.