He would get over this misadventure. A kebab stand smoked on the other side of the street, the smell like a hook in his guts, and Wallace pushed away the profoundly unsettling thoughts about his unfinished report, about his boss in Accra who was waiting for him even now, who had been waiting for days, and he instead filled his mind with visions of his hotel room: a cold shower and a bottle of water, fried rice with chicken, and a long, dead sleep on the bed, curtains drawn. He would need excuses — fantastic, bulletproof excuses — but he could dream those up in his sleep. Right now, what he needed most was a cash machine.
The streetscape had shifted dramatically in daylight. Gone were the stumbling drunks and menacing children, the wretched homeless and ghoulish torches. Young men with dress shirts tucked into pleated pants gathered around newsstands and read the headlines. Women sat on buckets and sliced mangoes, flies corkscrewing around peels of curling skin. Taxi drivers worked their clutches and palmed their horns. Across the street from the hotel, where last night the darkness had been thickest and the smells most repugnant, Wallace now saw the mouth of a market, a clutter of stands on the dusty ground, and behind the counters women lounged on their elbows, swatted at flies with loose bolts of cloth, pounded huge pestles into mortars full of he didn’t know what, the steady thump resounding throughout the scene.
“Excuse me,” Wallace said, swiping the back of his wrist across his brow, watching one of these women lift the pestle over her head and drive it into the mortar, and he was amazed to see another woman squatting on a stool, rhythmically turning a doughy batter this way and that, backwards and forwards, the pestle hammering steadily downward, the two of them working together in perfect tandem. “Hey. Excuse me. Bank machine. I need a bank machine. Hey. Do you know where there’s a bank machine?”
They ignored him, and so he watched for a moment longer, shrugged, stepped deeper into the market, his head oscillating from one side to the other, dozens of tiny tomatoes stacked in pyramids, cobs of corn smouldering on grills, bunches of plantains like beckoning fingers.
“Is there a bank machine nearby?” he asked a woman reading a newspaper next to a basket of onions. “Anywhere?”
And when she did not deign to look up at him, he ran his fingers quickly through his hair, sweat spraying from his head, and he stepped backwards, stumbled on the uneven ground, turning around to face another woman, this one staring right at him, her face weather-cracked and flush with . . . what? Mockery? She began shouting at him, pointing at his chest with a gnarl-knuckled finger, gesturing from him to the Zoloft, from him to the hotel, over and over, and he could feel the other women rousing themselves now, could hear sandaled feet scrabbling the dirt, a multitude of curious voices crowding his ears.
“Do you speak English?” Wallace asked, trying hard to keep a smile on his face, his hands open and innocuous at his hips. “I just need . . . I can’t. I don’t understand what you’re even saying. Bank machine. In English it’s a bank machine.”
They stepped around from their counters. They swept aside their beaded curtains and advanced from their kiosks. A single tomato tumbled from atop a precarious pyramid and rolled beneath Wallace’s retreating footfalls. He crushed it, sent a short, seedy jet of red fluid bursting from under his shoes. The women gasped. They spoke louder, faster, closed in tighter. Wallace inched gingerly backward to the edge of the sidewalk, his heels scraping in the dust.
The first tomato hit him in the elbow. He didn’t understand it right away, merely felt the blow and recoiled, caught a glimpse of something red and wet bouncing away in front of him. The next one hit him in the back of the head, hard, and he heard it squish against his skull, felt a warm trickle ooze under the collar of his shirt. Then they seemed to come all at once, from every direction, juices spurting and arching. Deflated tomato skins clung to his clothes, gathered at his feet, and all he could do was bend over, cover himself, cower behind his seed-encrusted forearms: meagre little shields, but they had to suffice until the women eventually grew tired and lost interest.
VI.
Hours later, in the courtyard of his hotel, the children kicked a soccer ball and various staff members slumped around the pitch, watching and cheering. Wallace kept his head down as he walked past them, but he recognized the maid in the crowd — Blessing or Charity or whatever her name was — and he knew they were staring. Such was life the whole way back from the Zoloft, his fingerprints red and juicy on the buttons of an ATM, stray dogs crowding around him as he flagged a cab, and the driver charged him double because of the mess he made on the seats. Now, he squeezed the room key in his pocket and marched past the courtyard, eyes locked on the ground as he travelled down the hallway.
It took him a second to register that his door was already open and the TV was on. He hesitated on the threshold, not sure anymore which side promised the most privacy, which side offered the truest safety. He equivocated for a long moment, unable to decide, until finally he did what he’d always done and walked inside his room.
A young boy sat on the bed, his tiny ankles crossed, his knees scuffed and bloodied, one arm propped up on a soccer ball as he pointed a remote at the TV and aimlessly surfed the channels. Wallace glanced around the room, cataloguing his belongings, and it was obvious that the kid had rooted through his entire luggage. Wallace’s boxer shorts hung off the chair and dangled from the ceiling fan. He’d packed three watches, and they were on the bed next to the kid’s soccer ball. He’d brought along a small stack of technical files, none of which he reviewed while waiting for Cass, and their pages were thrown scattershot across the room. The boy had even used a few as plates for sliced pineapple. Die Hard was playing on TV, and he moved his lips in sequence with volleys of gunfire. Wallace involuntarily shrunk away.
Wearily, he presented himself at reception, his skin stained and tomato seeds stuck in his hair and to his clothes. He could smell the liquor on his own breath, and he stared at the concierge, who wore a stick-on nametag that said Kwame and reclined in a plastic lawn chair, flipping idly through a newspaper with last night’s Zoloft raid on the front cover. Child Brothel!!! Busted!!
“Um.” Wallace wiped his mouth with his wrist. “Excuse me. Sir?”
Kwame looked up from the paper, his mouth tightening. “My God, sir,” he exclaimed. “But what has happened to you?”
“My room,” Wallace said, and he paused to fight back the tears. “The maid has robbed my room.”
Kwame shot to his feet and picked up the desk phone. He lifted the receiver to his ear, floated his hand over the keypad and prepared to stab the buttons, then stopped, rested the phone on his shoulder, looked sympathetically at Wallace and said: “Wait. Wait, sir. Which maid has committed the crime?”
“That one out there,” said Wallace, turning to point into the courtyard. “See the one by the soccer pitch? With the dreadlocks? I saw her do it.”
Kwame frowned deeply. He slammed the phone into its cradle and rounded the counter at speed, his sandals slapping his heels as he moved. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, grabbing the attention of other men watching the match.
“These stupid-stupid girls,” he said, jabbing his finger at the maid. “They are always causing problems here.”
The maid looked from Kwame to Wallace, and her face collapsed in fear.
“But don’t worry, sir,” Kwame said. “She will return what she has stolen.”
She tried to flee the soccer pitch, but the crowd was too thick and she was trapped there like a deadhead in a river. She made a pleading gesture with her hands, but Wallace turned to watch Kwame storm toward the match.
“Stupid-stupid girl,” he shouted over his shoulder. “We will teach her a lesson.”
Shadowboxing
Richard walks out of the hospital and into the filthy spasms of the street. He clutches his knees. Heavy breathing. Gasping. A black plastic bag blows down the road, twisting through traffic, and the
details of the last few weeks rear up to mock him: the ultrasound jelly on his hip; the latex gloves, torn between forefinger and thumb; the pastor puking in the waiting room; the extortionist nurse dressed in green and the doctor with his distant, deadpan pronouncement: “This is a tumour. You should return to your country at once.”
Panic is an event that moves outward from the chest. It consumes the fingers. Richard looks at his shadow sprawled across the sidewalk. Is that . . . death? There all along?
No. Too ridiculous.
But then panic consumes the toes.
People formicate all around him, over every surface, the middle class giving way to the lower; tailored suits to grubby feet — and everywhere those black plastic bags, full of kenkey or banku, gripped in hand or discarded and drifting down sidewalks. A goat pitches a losing battle with a dog over the skin of a pineapple. Drunks sit on rickety wooden benches waiting for soup or rice or cigarettes. A rooster alights upon a mound of trash and declares itself. Young girls in fake kente dresses carry all sorts of things on their heads: water, fish, crackers, stationery, schoolbooks. The older women are the mercantile heart of the country, working all the time, with knuckles like wooden knots as they concede to old age, then death. Policemen try and fail to direct traffic, shouting hoarsely at passing taxis. There are holes in the sidewalk big enough to swallow a man, and the rough and cratered road is snarled with traffic: vehicles, bicycles, hawkers, disabled people hauling themselves along on rolling scraps of plywood, everyone shouting and every horn blaring and all the music thumping.
For a second, it’s like the whole place will shatter, a huge piece of intricate stained glass, completely shattered. Then it’s like that for another second. And then another. Then it’s like that all the time.
Richard is woozy with this awareness, but a display of sunglasses blocks out his shadow, about a hundred of them stuck in the tattered brown foam of a ratty makeshift pegboard. He sees his face bending in the curve of an aviator lens, and he can’t help but notice he hasn’t shaved his neck, must be weeks, so he buys the shades before he starts crying for the first time since grade four, when George Ericson stuck a baseball bat in the spoke of his bicycle and walked home laughing.
“Boss,” says the spindly hawker, all wrists and ankles and barely fourteen, staring at his ten Ghana cedis like they were far beneath his frail carriage. “Your money, e no go reach.”
Richard puts the shades on and slowly stands up straight, cracking his shoulders and puffing out his chest. Summoning strength. He pictures this kid bouncing off the ropes in the Jamestown ring, his footwork maybe a pleasant surprise, but still unable to endure even a simple jab from one of Richard’s boys.
“You want more money, kid?” Richard’s voice is rough and strained. “Learn to box.”
The kid stares for a long second, pure fury in his eyes. But there’s nothing he can do, so he heaves the sunglasses display high up into the air, lowers it onto a sweaty cloth bundled around the top of his head, and strolls away, deftly dodging a motorcycle that jumps the sidewalk, the driver wearing shorts and sandals but no shirt or helmet.
The glasses give a numbed seclusion. Behind their lenses, things feel a little better. Fate feels a little less likely. All he has to do is avoid the cranked indifference of the city. He picks his way through the smashed aesthetic, understands it as a microcosm of the entire country, which has so few of the smooth, finished, and reassuring edges back home.
His first week in Accra, Richard saw a teenager get hit by a car. The kid had bolted across a main road, barely glancing over his shoulder. He was hit by a sedan trailing black smoke. He bounced off the headlight and flew into a roadside soup stand set up underneath a neem tree. His arms and legs writhed in mid-air, like ropes rotating in space. The driver kept right on going, and only a few men chased him, but half-heartedly, eventually giving up and walking back to the accident scene. All the women with their brightly coloured headscarves crowded around the boy while he died. They pleaded with God and Allah: Save our boy, and save us all. Then they turned stoic after he passed. Richard shook his head. These things happen, but usually just on TV. He went to one of the little shanty bars and had a few beers. He shot a few games of pool and chatted with a hooker.
Maybe, he thinks, he should do that right now. Go on a bender. Forget it all and wake up cured, with a hangover.
His shadow follows him down the hospital road and onto the shoulder of the freeway, where the crowds let up a little. It looks better now, his shadow. It promises a strong white guy, early thirties, broad shoulders, legs thick and fast. It slides smoothly along. It’s maybe a bit out of place, accustomed to locales with running water and reliable electricity, high-density condo towers and comfortable public transit. It’s maybe a little out of place, sure, but that’s all.
Moving down the freeway now, and it’s a roaming cluster of flickering tail lights. All the taxis and minibuses have religious exhortations stickered to their rear windows:
Jesus Is Life
It Is a Lesson
Allah Is Great
To the west, beyond a sagging chain-link fence, the sun is falling and the sky is scarlet and crimson. The silhouettes of coconut trees rise into the dusk like frail arms throwing punches. There’s a slum over there, a broken maze of tin roofs and wooden shacks, smashed cement and overflowing gutters. Black smoke floats up from a few separate locations, twisting in the sky, thick and biblical. Somewhere in that infamous, shit-strewn apocalypse, scrap collectors are burning electronic waste on the shores of an irreparably spoiled lagoon, and their noxious infernos cast stick-figure shadows across a terrain of shattered plastic and shredded clothes.
Not far ahead of Richard, leaning against a tree, a naked guy with dreaded hair is smoking a joint the size of a rolled-up textbook. His dreadlocks are thick as forearms, and his ribs beg through the skin of his chest. He watches calmly as Richard approaches, tendrils of smoke curling out of his mouth and nostrils. It’s almost dark now, except for across the freeway, where a crew of young men carve coffins under generator-powered lights.
“Cha’lay,” the guy says to Richard. “Where from you?”
They’re face to face now. The smell of this guy is sunburned and dead. He draws hard on his massive spliff, and it blazes an amber glow across his features.
Richard clears his throat, moves to take off his sunglasses, but changes his mind. “Calgary,” he says. “What about you?”
The guy points to the tumult of smoke rising above the slum. Then he taps his cheeks, which look almost decomposing, and points with his spliff to a pile of trash and torn blankets strewn around the tree. His fingertips are like half-eaten jerky.
“Leper,” he says, with a resigned smile.
Richard jerks backward, almost falling into the loosening traffic of the freeway.
“Oh!” the guy shouts, reaching out to steady him. “Sorry, oh. Sorry!”
“Don’t,” Richard stammers, “don’t touch me.”
The guy leans against the tree and puffs away pensively.
“You dey volunteer?” he asks after a few seconds.
“Yeah. So?”
“Please, I beg,” says the guy, pointing at the tree. “Make you buy one of dis ting, one-one cedi. One-one cedi.”
Dangling from the tree like Christmas ornaments are dozens of stars fashioned from those black plastic bags. The guy stands beneath them and raises his hands, like a child getting stoned at a craft fair.
“Dem, dey be stars from Ghana flag, mahn. Black stars, cha’lay. Black ones.”
Richard laughs hysterically. “Look, buddy. All you’ve done here is redesign some garbage.”
The guy grins proudly. “Yeah. Ebi so.”
“Move,” Richard snaps. “I have to go.”
“Oh! Why?”
“I’m dying. Maybe. And I want to go box.”
“Oh! Cha’
lay! Sorry, oh.”
The guy reaches up through a cloud of dope smoke and plucks one of his stars from the tree. He looks at Richard and smiles pityingly. “Make I give you one, brudda. No charge. Ebi dash. Dis way God go take you safe to heaven because He go see you love Ghana.”
Richard tears the star out of his hand and throws it in the freeway. The thought of making friends with this guy is repulsive. They’re nothing alike. No hunk of trash will change that.
“God is dead,” Richard spits, all first-year university, and he stomps up the sidewalk, looking briefly over his shoulder, the coffin-carvers staring after him as the filthy leper stumbles through traffic, trying to retrieve his garbage star and about to fall to pieces in the salt wind blowing off the ocean.
George Ericson is beating a speedbag by the time Richard gets to the gym. He’s utterly immersed, his taped fists delivering an infinitum of combinations, like rotating machinery bolted to the end of his formidable wrists as he dips, dances, and ducks around the bag. He’s wearing a tucked-in wife-beater and a pair of gym shorts that say United Nations Recreation across the waist. Seeing this, Richard for the first time realizes he may lose parts of his body, may see them cut away, because cancer — yes, because cancer. He touches his stomach, his hips, and his ribs.
A half dozen kids encircle him, cheering and laughing and shadowboxing each other. Every once in a while, George breaks up his routine with a pretend uppercut into the audience — always a burst of shrieking laughter when he does this.
A Plea for Constant Motion Page 17