A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  The sedan jerked forward suddenly as Cass divined an opening in the traffic. A barrage of blaring horns acknowledged his success. They were moving now, infinitesimally. Embarrassed, Wallace sank into his seat and watched petty traders in colourful skirts mill through traffic with bowls full of plastic water sachets balanced on their heads.

  “If your boss can’t make it,” Wallace said, his eyes fixed outside, “that’s fine. But I need to see the roads leading to the docks and the docks themselves. I need to talk to the engineers and a few of the managers. I just need some numbers, okay? Please?”

  “Sure,” said Cass in his singsong voice. “No problem, Mr. Wallace. You will see the infrastructure in Ghana here. You will have the numbers for your report. No problem.”

  “Good,” Wallace was going to say, but the radio cut him off with a blast of staggering dance beats, the lyrics syncopated, polyglot, stitched onto the back of a throbbing bass line that shook the speaker housing in the door next to his knee. He broke into a fresh sweat, in spite of the air conditioning. Cass, meanwhile, seemed somehow to merge into the song, his knees rising and falling like waves in a pool as he drummed his manicured fingers on the steering wheel, swung his head from side to side so that his sunglasses mirrored Wallace’s glossy face with every downbeat.

  “Ghana music, mahn,” Cass shouted over the volume. “Homegrown, boy!”

  Wallace pressed his hands against the outsides of his front and back pockets. His wallet was still there. The hotel keys were, too. He kept checking as they crawled forward over the next hour. An endless and interchangeable cast of young women approached the windows of the car, bags of candy in their outstretched hands, sachets of water, a map of Ghana, schoolbooks and romance novels, their mouths an imploring blur on the other side of the glass.

  “You want something, Mr. Wallace?” Cass asked, switching off the radio and sliding down the driver’s side window.

  “I’m fine,” he said, even though he was thirsty, hungry, bored, anxious. “But where are we going?”

  Cass shrugged and leaned out the window, called to one of the girls in one of their languages and glanced at Wallace over his shoulder. With a wink, he took the girl by her hand and muttered something short and fast, his thumb cocked inside toward Wallace, who wilted as the heat swept in from outside. The girl bent down, balanced the bowl of goods in the crook of her arm, and peered smilingly into the car. She was a teenager. Her cotton shirt stuck to her breasts. Twin beads of sweat streamed from her temples. She made eye contact with Wallace and giggled.

  “You like the girl, enh?” Cass sniggered, reaching into her bowl and plucking a sealed sack of water from a collection of similar bladder-shaped bags.

  “What’s she laughing at?” Wallace demanded, surprised at the anger in his voice.

  In front of them, the traffic gave way, and Cass accelerated, calmly resting the bag in the crotch of his pants and fishing a few coins from the centre console. Wallace twisted in his seat, saw the girl galloping to keep up with them, her features chiselled with determination, one hand clutching the rim of the bowl she’d placed back on her head. Cass dangled his loosely clenched fist out the window, let it bob in the wind like a fishing lure in a current. He braked suddenly as traffic thickened again, and the girl materialized at the door, gasping, her hand hovering and snapping at Cass’s fingers. The sound of coins clinking into her palm rang out through the cacophony of blaring horns and shouting drivers. Cass thumbed a button on his door and the window rose back up.

  “What was she laughing at?” Wallace asked again, his outrage under control.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said Cass, biting off the corner off his sachet and sucking water into his mouth. “She say she like you.”

  “Right,” said Wallace. “I’m sure she did. And the maid at the hotel? What did she say?”

  “Oh, cha’lay, that one, I don’t know” — he broke off as his phone rang, the ringtone just like the music on the radio, and Wallace watched him natter and jabber and jaw, annoyed with himself for not having bothered to learn at least a few phrases of the local languages — “small boy,” Cass laughed into the phone, before clicking off and sliding it into his breast pocket. “Change of plans, Mr. Wallace. The minister is too busy today. Too busy. He say I should take you out for nightlife instead. And then we talk later about the loan, okay?”

  “You’re kidding me,” Wallace said. “I mean you’re fucking kidding me, right?”

  “Serious thing, cha’lay. He be too busy. Some big man from China come special from Beijing to meet Mr. Minister today. So we talk later, okay?”

  But Wallace had been trained to handle just this very obstacle. He launched into the talking points: sure, they could borrow money from the Chinese, but then they’d have to use Chinese manufactured goods to upgrade their shipping infrastructure; they’d have to use Chinese engineers on their road crews; they’d have to start paying interest on their loan as soon as it passed their parliament. Sure, they could borrow money from the Chinese. But was that any way to capitalize on an oil boom?

  “Oh,” Cass said cheerfully. “Mr. IMF. Mr. Junior IMF. He know da ting, oh. But don’t worry, enh? We talk about it later, when your boss he come for visit my boss.”

  “But,” said Wallace, astounded, his hands clutching at the cool air blowing from the vents. “But my boss is with your boss’s boss! I’m here for the meeting! They sent me!”

  Cass sucked the last of the water from the crinkling bag, lowered the window, and threw the garbage into traffic.

  “That one, cha’lay,” he said, “that one is just not fair.”

  III.

  The crimson red Zoloft Hotel occupied the corner of a downtown thoroughfare and seemed to bulge into the night like a sack of dirty, sucking lungs. Cass led Wallace through an impossible crowd that spilled off the sidewalks and into the gloomy, traffic-snarled streets around the hotel: the ratty, hissing homeless; ghoulishly drunk men hurtling from one step to the next; fierce-looking young boys setting off firecrackers in the middle of the road; furrow-faced women hocking pepe-battered kebobs, their children sleeping in bundles of blankets heaped around the pavement; no electric streetlights, but instead tiki torches flickering in a sickly breeze, blending shadows on the ground, and on the edges of the light a huge, benighted quadrant that swirled with strange noises and rancid smells. The Zoloft was the epicentre of all this activity, and Wallace, sweaty hands in his pockets grasping at his keys and his wallet, hurried behind Cass toward the front door.

  “You pay for nothing,” said Cass, escorting him inside a wide, circular room and across the mouldering cement floor littered with crushed cigarette butts and flattened bottle caps. The bar was crowded and they took a seat in the middle of the room. Wallace’s eyes adjusted to the gloomy lighting, and he saw women traipsing from one shadow to the next along the rear wall. They towered on stilettos, dark-skinned breasts bursting at the seams of frayed and florid dresses, silver flashes of sweat shining from hard-set jaws and hair styled into enormous dreadlocks hanging above gunship hips. Drinks arrived and Cass sank into his phone, knocking out text messages and grinning behind the rim of his plastic cup. Wallace stared into the shadows and tried to discern details — fingernails, clavicles, earlobes, nipples jutting through cloth — but could not isolate any particular thing from the carousel of swollen, sweaty other things. Then more drinks arrived.

  Their table was thick with empty plastic cups when finally the women peeled themselves out of the shadows and began sidling into the thicket of leering drunks. Wallace was rapt, eyes red and throbbing as they inched closer.

  Cass looked up from the screen of his phone. “Should I give you one?”

  Wallace nodded.

  Cass reached into the air and snapped his fingers, hissed under his breath, and a dozen pretty heads jerked toward them as he extended his index finger, let it drift slowly from one face to the other, fina
lly settling on a short girl with faint acne and purple streaks in her hair. She hovered over their table, dress melting off her sloping shoulders, and exchanged words with Cass, again in a language Wallace didn’t understand. But she looked at him, bit her lip, smiled, and winked.

  His legs were mud as he stood up from the table, slid his perspiring palm into hers, and followed her into the shadows where she lived. There were dozens of doors built into the walls, shaky planks of wood hanging limply from their hinges, and as she led him behind one, Wallace sunk a hand into his pocket and felt around for his wallet.

  The room was a coffin, a tiny thing made of rotten wood and flapping blue tarps, with a bare, thin mattress in the middle of the floor and washed-out photos taped to the walls: a young girl in a bright green dress smiling at a twist of cotton candy in her hand; a long shot of maybe the same girl running down a beach, a kite flapping in the air behind her; a close-up of a wizened, bag-eyed couple sitting on a crowded bus. The girl weaved through flickering candles, her heels clacking off the ground. She threw herself onto the mattress, giggling, her bejewelled fingers coaxing, and her breasts rising up toward the mottled ceiling. But Wallace only stood there, clasping absently at his crotch as his eyes bounced off the walls, which loomed with crippled studs and battered puffs of insulation. When he looked back at the girl, she was topless, her dress bunched up at her waist, and maybe it was the walls that knocked him tumbling through time and place. Maybe it was the raw-boned look of them that sent him reeling into his memory, landing in childhood, lying on his stomach, grinding against the floor in the unfinished rooms of his parents’ home, their new addition hanging off the frame of the house like a second ribcage. And even though the girl began to talk, her voice lilting through a mosaic of accents she’d adopted from gabby sex tourists, Wallace lost himself in the memory, saw his boy-self sulking outside after supper, after his brother angrily refused to let him into their room because of what he did with the secret air rifle (“They could’ve taken it away!”), so that Wallace crept into the backyard and peeled back the white plastic sheets hanging off the addition, the smell of wood thick in the air, hoses and visors and hardhats hanging from the nails hammered into the dozens of studs, and he hoisted himself up onto the plywood floor, slipped through the gaps in the inside walls and made his way to his new bedroom, a small, rectangular space of his own. He lay face down on the floor and conjured images of the lifeguard, her bathing suit straps sliding down her meaty shoulders, hard jets of water blasting from the showerheads, soap sliding down her back, which was wreathed in steam, and all at once, she noticed a shadow in the locker and he stiffened; all at once his dad climbed up into the unfinished addition, started calling his name, and he stiffened; and all at once, while the prostitute wriggled on the mattress, a furious voice erupted from the other side of the door, a fist hammering against it. Wallace couldn’t help it; he stiffened.

  The door cracked open and in thundered a trio of shouting policemen dressed in camouflage. They pointed their assault rifles at Wallace, whose hand fell limply away from his crotch. They pressed inward, a chaos in the bar behind them. Wallace floated backwards until his heels stubbed against the wall. A rifle barrel hove into view and eclipsed the clenched features of the man wielding it. From her station on the bed, the girl shrieked, once, quickly and reluctantly, as a man yanked her upright by the wrist and another fell to his knees and threw aside the mattress, grabbling for a pathetic collection of loose, wet bills crumpled and smushed into the floor. Her voice grew bitter, enraged, and she broke free from her captor and rushed the other, bringing down a hail of blows across his head and neck. The two of them could barely subdue her, and they strained to wrench her fists behind her back and snap on a set of handcuffs. Even in restraints, she threw herself against them, spat on the floor, screamed at the ceiling.

  “Take her outside,” said the one holding the gun on Wallace. “And bring us two chairs.”

  The men grunted assent and dragged the girl into the bar, which was lit up now, long lines of women struggling against handcuffs as rifle-touting policemen led them away.

  “My friend,” Wallace stammered, his tongue sticking to his cheeks and gums. “My friend is out there. I. He. His name is Cass. He works for the minister. I’m a foreigner.”

  The policeman said nothing from behind the dark moon of his gun barrel.

  “But I work for the International Monetary Fund,” Wallace begged, his chin sinking to his chest. “We’re here to help with your oil, man. I mean, you guys called us. Remember?”

  The policeman pointed his rifle and time passed hellishly, long seconds marked in sweat and a thousand stumbling heartbeats, until finally the man’s partner returned with two chairs, offered one to his superior and slid the other across the floor to Wallace. He left the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Please,” the policeman said, lowering the gun. “Please sit down.”

  He motioned to the chair with a large, crack-skinned hand. His face softened as he lowered himself into his own chair. He wore a neat, wiry moustache and crossed his legs tightly, one knee hinging over the other, his shiny, polished combat boots reflecting light from the candles. Wallace sat on the edge of his chair and stared at the boots.

  “I am Captain Boatye,” he said. “I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances. I will not offer you a cigarette. I will not offer you something to drink. You are in serious trouble, do you understand? I will not make this easy on you, simply because you are a foreigner, or even if, as you claim, you work for an international organization. Do you understand me, sir?”

  Wallace nodded, kept his eyes locked on the captain’s boots, could find nothing at all to say.

  “That girl?” The captain drummed his fingers on his knees and leaned slightly forward. “She is just that, you know? A girl. A young girl which you have defiled. She is here because she was told there are many jobs now in town, because of the oil and the development, and so she can make money for her family and send it back to wherever they happen to live. A village, probably. A small one. A small and poor village way up in the north of this country. Yes, but of course, there are no jobs here, not for small girls and even barely for healthy young men. So she comes to a place like this where she is given employment by people like you, people who must now be punished for breaking the law and defiling a child. Do you understand this tragedy? Do you?”

  “I didn’t even touch her,” Wallace whimpered, trembling as the captain planted both boots on the floor and rose to his feet. “I didn’t sleep with that girl.”

  “Then tell me.” The captain stepped across the tiny room and soared over Wallace. “Why was there ejaculate on her clothes, enh? On her dress? This is a very serious crime. Fresh ejaculate. Very serious! On her dress! And why else would it be there? You were alone in the room with the girl!”

  Wallace began softly to cry. His shoulders hitched and he dug for his voice in the small pit of his stomach. “It,” he snuffled, “was an accident. I was thinking of someone else. I was. I didn’t mean to touch her. I was barely even here. Please!”

  “Please? Please what?”

  “Please. Please just let me go. Back to my hotel. Back home.”

  The captain lapsed into another taut silence. Wallace slumped in his chair, raked his sodden face and choked on his garbled appeals. He clenched his clammy toes in his shoes. But he couldn’t bring himself to look up at Captain Boatye, to watch the man’s severe, moustachioed face as he considered the weepy petition. Instead, he stared at the boots, the shiny black boots treading calmly across the hot, ugly floor. Minutes passed.

  “I will let you go because I think you have learned your lesson,” the captain said finally, returning to his chair. “But first, you must give me something small.”

  IV.

  Wallace spent the night in the prostitute’s cramped and salty quarters. The mattress was like wet cardboard under his back. The c
andles flickered and hissed as their wicks burned down to nothing. That smell. He recognized that smell again, this time coming from the wall studs, and he closed his eyes against them, saw his father crouched over him, his father always so tired and impatient, reading glasses slung around his neck, coarse red hairs in his beard, hands like mallets and breath a dank potpourri of coffee, liquor, cigarettes, beef, and his dad said, Son, I’ve been looking all over for you and his dad said, I just received an unfortunate phone call, and his dad said, Turn over and face me what are you doing out here it’s dangerous. His dad grimaced at the smell, disgust screwing up his face. He turned away, became absorbed in the carpenter’s hanging plastic. A late summer’s breeze blew through the addition, everything creaking and leaning, the smell swept away, and his dad turned back to him and said, Look, and his dad said, I don’t want you hiding in change rooms anymore, and his dad said, That kind of behaviour, it’s disgusting and Wallace rolled over to protest, to lie, to say that he had never been near any change room, that he didn’t know what they were even talking about, but his dad slapped him, palm whipping off his cheek and the sheer, cracking sound splitting the breeze. His dad said, And I sure hope that wasn’t you who hurt the young lady on her way home so help me God, Wallace, because then I would have to tell your mother all about this do you understand? and Wallace tasted that his nose was bleeding, so he nodded, licked his upper lip, and his dad said, Good, I hope you’ve learned your lesson, and then his dad walked away and let him sleep the whole night by himself in the addition, where they were going to build his brand-new room.

  V.

  Outside the Zoloft, morning washed the night away. In his pockets, slick with the gritty sweat of a thousand double checks, Wallace’s wallet weighed nothing at all. Stepping out onto the busy sidewalk, the sun a flaming lance, he palmed around for it anyway, his spirits sagging as he recalled how he’d so gratefully given the captain five hundred American dollars and a hundred Ghana cedis. But at least he’d been able to keep his credit cards. The captain had plucked them from the wallet and run his long fingers back and forth over the raised numbers, whistling a low melody as he lifted his eyebrows in consideration, and then, mercifully, dropped them to the floor, uninterested. The hotel room key never became an object of concern, and Wallace clutched it now, looking for a break in the traffic, stepping out too soon and incurring the wrath of outraged motorists.