DOA
June 22, 2008 Ghana, West Africa
There was a click. There was a bang.
And then everything behind me went frozen. Dead.
My arms reached out toward the man falling to the ground in front of me. My heart stopped beating. The only sounds in the room were the bracelets clanking on my wrists and the thump the stranger’s head made as it bounced hard against the bar room floor. I stood above him, frozen in place, and my throat felt tight and grainy. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think of what to do next. This was the closest I’d ever been to someone so near death, and the farthest I’d ever been from home.
When it was done, when it seemed that I and everyone else in the back room was sure the thing was over, time flickered from being a still, silent thing to something real, something moving, quick and sneaky. This was no picture. No fiction. Not a part of the love poem I’d written in my notebook. It was the real thing. What in the hell was I doing there?
I gasped.
I heard the sound of a woman, who I thought was one of the waitresses, screaming, a glass hitting the floor. I could see the gun, pointed up now, in his other hand.
“He’s dead. Oh-oh, my God, he’s dead,” I said, falling out of the bar behind Dame. The street was empty and we rushed, one behind the other, to hide behind an old van parked a ways down. “You killed him,” I said.
I turned and tried to stop to look at Dame. I wanted to see his eyes, So I could know that we both knew what was going on, what had happened in just seconds.
Minutes earlier, we’d been laughing with the stranger in the red shirt and tan hat. His skin was the color and shine of oil. He hovered above our table, his teeth and eyes perfectly white and glowing in the dim light. He’d smiled wide when I told him that since we’d been in Ghana, Dame’s already-shadowy skin had tanned to the color of midnight and my once-permed hair had sweated out into a moist, perfect afro. We were two lovers, mismatched and careless in the middle of a strange place, drunk from liquor that had no label and heat that made my reality a blissful haze.
“I ain’t kill that fool,” Dame said, tossing me back around before I could get a look at his eyes. “He was dead long before I got a hand on him.”
I heard wrestling and shouting coming up the street. I craned my neck around the back of the van to see the bar emptying out. People were pointing in different directions along the dirt road and speaking a language I didn’t know.
“Go,” Dame said, his hand pushing hard at my back.
We hustled fast, in silence now, to the car, which seemed so far away. One of my bracelets popped and the wooden beads—red, black, and green, spelling out my name in rude, hand-painted white letters—scattered J-O-U-R-N-E-Y everywhere.
“Get everything. Everything,” Dame said after he’d kicked in the door to our hotel room. “I’m calling Benji. We going back to Accra right now.”
He paced the floor, flipping his cell phone open and closed as I sat motionless in the space I’d found in the middle of the bed. Dame was in a rage. Moving his body around heavily, deliberately like a boxer.
I didn’t know what would happen next. I had to think. I needed to pray.
With my purse still on my shoulder, I looked around. Everything was the same. The same as it was when we’d left the room that morning. My sea-colored sarong was on the floor. His sneakers were next to the nightstand. Outside, the black night above the beach was awaiting our nightly walk. It was still Kumasi. But everything was different.
I closed my eyes to pray for clarity. For forgiveness. For the man’s soul. For Dame’s soul. For anything I could think of. Just in that one second. To try to understand. But all I could hear was bang. Bang. Bang.
“This shit ain’t working,” I heard Dame say. I opened my eyes and looked up to see him looking at the phone and then at me. “Journey,” Dame called, walking to me, “What you doing? We got to go.”
“I—I…” I wanted to say something, but I kept remembering the blood choking out of the man’s stomach as he landed at my feet.
“J,” Dame said softly, bending down in front of me at the foot of the bed. “We don’t have time for you to get all nervous now. We got to get out of here. You saw those people. They gonna come for us.”
I watched as he tried to soften his eyes to persuade me. But I could not be moved. The man I was in love with just took someone’s life. Was he a man at all? Had I just been lying to myself all these weeks? Was everyone else right about Dame?
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.
“Fuck!” Dame got up and turned his back.
“If you’d just let Benji come with us…everything would’ve been…” I got up and followed him as he rushed to the closet.
“Fine?” He looked at me as he pulled out our suitcases. “You said you wanted me to yourself.”
“Yeah,” I cried, “but I didn’t think anything like this would happen.”
“What do you think the bodyguards are for, J? You ain’t with some random nigga. Everywhere I go, some fool comes up to test me,” he said frustrated. He threw the bags onto the bed and then began clumsily tossing things from the floor inside of them.
“But you still didn’t have to do that. You shot that man.”
“He pulled out a gun. He would’ve killed both of us.”
“It was just on the table. He didn’t say he was going to use it. He just wanted your watch.” I looked down at the circle of diamonds and platinum hanging heavy and oversized from his wrist. Suddenly it seemed incredibly out of place.
“So, I was supposed to give it to him and then he was just gonna let us walk out of there? It don’t work like that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know that you didn’t have to let things get out of control.”
“Look, I ain’t no country nigga that’s about to have some fool that ain’t even pointed a gun at me take my shit. He took the gun out first. He should’ve used it first. I ain’t no pussy and if you want a pussy, I believe you got one at home waiting on you.”
“Don’t bring him into this.”
“Well, that’s what you wanted, right?” Dame stopped again and looked at me, his dark eyes seemingly looking right through me. “Me to talk it out and shit? Give that motherfucker my watch and then buy him dinner? Drinks on me? Right?” He turned to me and I could see beads of sweat swelling across his tattoo-covered skin. A picture of Mary and Jesus on his stomach; a cross etched over his chest; his grandmother’s name on his right arm; the entire continent of Africa across his back, the northernmost tip near his left ear and the southernmost by his rear. He was all strength. His muscles moved in consistent, solid shapes when he took a single step. Massive and strong. I once loved this. But now he seemed larger than anything I could handle. Almost dangerous. He snatched the bag from the bed and turned around, nearly hitting me with it.
“I just don’t understand you.”
“Understand me?” He threw the bag down angrily and hurried over to me, grabbing my arms and pushing me up against the wall. A vein shuddered in his right temple. I saw the devil in him suddenly, pulsing in erratic red threads in his eyes. He wasn’t even thinking. Pressed against me, I could feel his heart thumping madly, faster than the seconds that ran by. “Don’t try to fucking understand me. I told you not to.” His voice was hard and distant. “I ain’t that man. I ain’t him. I ain’t…” He shoved me against the wall again and pushed away from me. “Shit,” he shouted, turning away and balling up his fists, punching at the air in anger. “I knew this would happen if I brought you here. You don’t belong here.”
“What?” Still up against the wall and afraid to move, I began crying. Now my heart was thumping and twitching in fear. I struggled to breathe. “Now I don’t belong here? What about everything you said?”
“Look,” he turned and came back to me, “I ain’t trying to be understood. I ain’t that motherfucker. I’m from the street. All I know how to do is live. Stay alive.” Spit gathered at the sides of his mouth and tears glossed his eyes, but in his rage not one would fall. “I’m an animal.” He swung at the wall to the right of my head and his fist went right through to the other side. He pulled his hand out of the wall and blood dripped to the floor. “I’m a fucking king. No one in the world understands me. Not supposed to.”
“Oh, my God, what did you do?” I said. I tried to grab his arm, but he pushed me to the floor.
“Take the car and go,” he said, his voice now void of any emotion. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the car keys and threw them at me. “Go back to Accra and get on the first plane back to Alabama. Get as far away from me as you can.”
“But, Dame,” I said, picking up the keys and fighting to see him through the tears in my eyes. He wasn’t thinking. “They’re gonna come for you.”
He looked at me hard and just before a single tear fell from his right eye, calm and clear as the waves outside the door, he whispered, “Go,” and walked out.