They ate on the screened patio, with moths buzzing against the screens. Hilliard wondered what moths had done ages ago, before electric lights, before candles, before human campfires. What did their phototropism do for them when the only lights at night were the stars?
“I had lunch with Donnelly,” he said. “I never did get back to the office. He dragged me out of town to see a witch doctor with a college education.”
“Oh?”
He described Atuele briefly, and the ritual they had witnessed. “I don’t know if he was really cured,” he concluded, “or what was wrong with him in the first place, but the change in him was pretty dramatic.”
“He was probably the witch doctor’s uncle.”
“I never thought of that.”
“More likely he believed he was sick, and the witch doctor got him to believe himself well. You know how superstitious they are in places like this.”
“I guess the chicken was superstitious, too.”
She rang for the serving girl, told her to bring more iced tea. To Hilliard she said, “I don’t suppose you’d have to study at the Sorbonne to learn how to kill a chicken.”
He laughed. The girl brought the tea. Hilliard normally drank his unsweetened, but tonight he added two spoons of sugar. He’d been doing this lately. Because life needs a little sweetness, he told himself.
He did not say anything to Marilyn about Donnelly’s ceremony.
“I wasn’t getting anywhere,” Donnelly had explained. “I was the kind of guy never got fired and never got promoted. What I was, I was never a take-charge kind of a guy.”
“That’s not how you seem.”
The smile again. “Alan, you never knew me before my ceremony. That’s the whole point. I’m changed.”
“A new man.”
“You could say that.”
“Tell me about it,” he’d said, and Donnelly had done just that. Reluctantly, he’d let it drop to Atuele that he’d been overlooked for promotion. Before he knew what was happening, he was admitting things to the shaman he’d never even admitted to himself. That he was ineffectual. That something always held him back. That his timing was off, that he never did the right thing or said the right thing, that when the going got tough he invariably shot himself in the foot.
“He told me I was afflicted,” Donnelly recalled. “That there was an imbalance that ought to be set right. That I needed a spirit.”
“And what happened?”
Donnelly shook his head. “I can’t really talk about that,” he said.
“You’re not allowed? If you talk about it your wish won’t come true?”
“Nothing like that. I mean I literally cannot talk about it. I can’t fit words to the tune. I don’t know exactly what happened.”
“Well, what did you do? You put your hands on a chicken and the poor thing couldn’t peck straight anymore?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Then what? I’m not making fun of you, I’m just trying to get the picture. What happened?”
“There was a ceremony,” Donnelly said. “Lots of people, lots of dancing and drumming. He gave me an herbal preparation that I had to swallow.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It didn’t get me high, if that’s what you’re thinking. It tasted like grass. Not dope, not that kind of grass. The kind cows eat. It tasted like lawn clippings that had started to compost.”
“Yum.”
“It wasn’t that terrible, but not your standard gourmet treat, either. I didn’t get a buzz from it. At least I don’t think I did. Later on I was dancing, and I think I went into a trance.”
“Really.”
“And there was a ritual in which I had to break an egg into a clean white cotton handkerchief, and Atuele rubbed the yolk of the egg into my hair.”
“It sounds like a conditioning treatment.”
“I know. Then they took me into one of the huts and let me go to sleep. I was exhausted, and I slept like a corpse for two or three hours. And then I woke up.”
“And?”
“And I went home.”
“That’s all?”
“And I’ve never been the same again.”
Hilliard looked at him. “You’re serious.”
“Utterly.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know what happened. But something happened. I was different. I acted differently and people reacted to me differently. I had confidence. I commanded respect. I—”
“Wizard of Oz stuff,” Hilliard said. “All he could give you was what you had all along, but the mumbo jumbo made you think you had confidence, and therefore you had it.”
But Donnelly was shaking his head. “There’s no way I can expect you to believe this,” he said, “because seeing isn’t believing, and neither is hearing. Let me tell you how I experienced it, all right?”
“By all means.”
“I woke up the next morning and nothing was different, I felt the same, except I’d slept very deeply and felt refreshed. But I also felt like an idiot, because I’d danced around like a savage and paid five hundred dollars for the privilege, and—”
“Five hundred dollars!”
“Yes, and—”
“Is that what it costs?”
“It varies, but it’s never cheap. It’s a lot higher relatively for the Togolese who must make up ninety-five percent of his regular clients. I’m sure that old man this afternoon must have paid a hundred dollars, and likely more. What do you give your house servants, twenty-five bucks a month? Believe me, it’s less of a sacrifice for me to come up with five hundred dollars than for a native to part with several months’ wages.”
“It still seems high.”
“It seemed high the morning after, take my word for it. I felt bloody stupid. I blamed myself six ways and backwards—for falling for it in the first place, and for not getting anything out of it, as if there was something there to be gotten and it was my fault it hadn’t worked. And then, it must have been ten days later and I’d put the whole thing out of my mind, and I was in a meeting with my then-boss and that old bastard Kostler. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Consider yourself lucky. I was in there, and Kostler was kicking our brains in, really killing us. And something clicked in. I felt the presence of a power within me that had not been there before. I took a breath, and I literally felt the energy shift in the room, the whole balance among the three of us. And I started talking, and the words were just there, Alan. I could have charmed the birds out of the trees, I could have talked a dog off a meat wagon.”
“You were on,” Hilliard suggested. “Everybody has days like that, when the edges just line up for you. I had it one night playing pool at the Harcourt Club in Nairobi. I couldn’t miss a shot. Bank shots, combinations—everything worked. And the next day I was the same klutz I’d always been.”
“But I wasn’t,” Donnelly said. “I had something extra, something I hadn’t had before, and it didn’t go away the next day or the next week or the next month. It can’t go away now. It’s not a lucky charm, something you could pick up downtown at the fetish market. It’s a part of who I am, but it’s a part that never existed before I ate Atuele’s lawn clippings and had an egg rubbed in my scalp.”
Hilliard thought about this. “You don’t think it’s all in your mind, then,” he said.
“I think it’s all in my self. I think, if you will, that my self has been enlarged by the addition of a spirit that wasn’t there before, and that this spirit has incorporated itself into my being, and—” He broke off abruptly, gave his head a shake. “Do you know something? I don’t know what I believe, or what happened, or how or why, either. I know that a month after my ceremony I got a five-thousand-dollar raise without asking for it, which makes Atuele look like a damned good investment. I’ve had two raises since then, and a promotion to the second desk in the Transcorporate Division. And they’re right to promote me, Alan. Before they were carrying me. Now I’m worth e
very penny they pay me.”
After dinner Hilliard and his wife watched a movie on the VCR. He couldn’t keep his mind on it. All he could think about was what he had seen in Atuele’s compound, and what Donnelly had told him at the hotel bar.
In the shower, he tried to picture the ceremony Donnelly had described. The roar of the shower became the relentless drumming of a quartet of grinning sweating half-naked blacks.
He dried off, made himself a drink, carried it into the air-conditioned bedroom. The lights were out and his wife was already sleeping, or putting on a good act. He got into bed and sipped his drink in the darkness. His heart welled up with the mixture of tenderness and desire that she always inspired in him. He set down his drink half-finished and laid a hand on her exposed shoulder.
His hand moved on her body. For a while she made no response, although he knew she was awake. Then she sighed and rolled over and he moved to take her.
Afterward he kissed her and told her that he loved her.
“It’s late,” she said. “I have an early day tomorrow.”
She rolled over and lay as she had lain when he came into the room. He sat up and took his drink from the nightstand. The ice had melted but the whiskey was cool. He sipped the drink slowly, but when the glass was empty he was still not sleepy. He thought of fixing himself another but he didn’t want to risk disturbing her.
He had the urge to put his hand on her bare shoulder again, not as a sexual overture but just to touch her. But he did not do this. He sat up, his hand at his side. After a while he lay down and put his head on the pillow, and after a while he slept.
Two days later he lunched with Donnelly at the native restaurant. Hilliard had chicken with yams with some sort of red sauce. It brought tears to his eyes and beaded his forehead with sweat. It was, he decided, even better than the stew he’d had there earlier.
To Donnelly he said, “The thing is, my life works fine just as it is. I’m happily married, I love my wife, and I’m doing well at the embassy. So why would I want a ceremony?”
“Obviously you don’t.”
“But the thing is I do, and I couldn’t tell you why. Silly, isn’t it?”
“You could talk with Atuele,” Donnelly offered.
“Talk with him?”
“He may tell you you don’t need a ceremony. One woman came to him with a list of symptoms a yard long. She was all primed to pay a fortune and be ordered to smear herself with palm oil and dance naked in the jungle. Atuele told her to cut back on starches and take a lot of vitamin C.” Donnelly poured the last of his beer into his glass. “I thought I’d take a run out there this afternoon myself,” he said. “Do you want to come along and talk with him?”
“I’m actually a very happy man,” he told Atuele. “I love my job, I love my wife, we have a pleasant, well-run home—”
Atuele listened in silence. He was smoking one of the cigarettes Hilliard had brought him. Donnelly had said it was customary to bring a gift, so Hilliard had picked up a carton of Pall Malls. For his part, Donnelly had brought along a liter of good scotch.
When Hilliard had run out of things to say, Atuele finished his cigarette and put it out. He gazed at Hilliard. “You are walking on the beach,” he said suddenly, “and you stop and turn around, and what do you see?”
What kind of nonsense was this? Hilliard tried to think of an answer. His own voice, unbidden, said: “I have left no footprints.”
And, quite unaccountably, he burst into tears.
He sobbed shamelessly for ten minutes. At last he stopped and looked across at Atuele, who had smoked half of another cigarette. “You ought to have a ceremony,” Atuele said.
“Yes.”
“The price will be four hundred dollars U.S. You can manage this?”
“Yes.”
“Friday night. Come here before sundown.”
“I will. Uh. Is it all right to eat first? Or should I skip lunch that day?”
“If you do not eat you will be hungry.”
“I see. Uh, what should I wear?”
“What you wish. Perhaps not a jacket, not a tie. You will want to be comfortable.”
“Casual clothes, then.”
“Casual,” Atuele said, enjoying the word. “Casual, casual. Yes, casual clothes. We are casual here.”
“Friday night,” Hilliard said. “How long do these things last?”
“Figure midnight, but it could go later.”
“That long.”
“Or you could be home by ten. It’s hard to say.”
Hilliard was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t think I would want Marilyn to know about this.”
“She’s not going to hear it from me, Alan.”
“I’ll say there’s an affair at the Gambian embassy.”
“Won’t she want to go?”
“God, have you ever been to anything at the Gambian embassy? No, she won’t want to go.” He looked out the car window. “I could tell her. It’s not that I have to ask her permission to do anything. It’s just—”
“Say no more,” said Donnelly. “I was married once.”
The lie was inconvenient in one respect. In order to appear suitably dressed for the mythical Gambian party, Hilliard left his house in black tie. At Donnelly’s office he changed into khakis and a white safari shirt and a pair of rope sandals.
“Casual,” Donnelly said, approvingly.
They took two cars and parked side by side at the entrance to Atuele’s compound. Inside, rows of benches were set up to accommodate perhaps three dozen Africans, ranging from very young to very old. Children were free to run around and play in the dirt, although most of them sat attentively beside their parents. Most of the Africans wore traditional garb, and all but a few were barefoot.
To the side of the benches ranged half a dozen mismatched armchairs with cushioned bottoms. Two of these were occupied by a pair of sharp-featured angular ladies who could have been sisters. They spoke to each other in what sounded a little like German and a little like Dutch. Hilliard guessed that they were Belgian, and that the language was Flemish. A third chair held a fat red-faced Australian whose name was Farquahar. Hilliard and Donnelly each took a chair. The sixth chair remained vacant.
At the front, off to one side, six drummers had already begun playing. The rhythm they laid down was quite complicated, and unvarying. Hilliard watched them for a while, then looked over at Atuele, who was sitting in an armchair and chatting with a black woman in a white robe. He was smoking a cigarette.
“For a spiritual guy,” Hilliard said, “he sure smokes a lot.”
“He has a taste for good scotch, too,” Farquahar said. “Puts a lot of it away, though you won’t see him drink tonight. Says alcohol and tobacco help keep him grounded.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“Oh, I’m an old hand,” Farquahar said. “I’m here every month or so. Don’t always have a personal ceremony, but I come just the same. He’s one of a kind, is our Atuele.”
“Really.”
“How old do you think he is?”
Hilliard hadn’t really thought about it. It was hard to tell with Africans. “I don’t know,” he said. “Twenty-eight?”
“You’d say that, wouldn’t you? He’s my age exactly and I’m forty-two. And he drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
One of the girls who’d assisted at the old man’s ceremony collected money from Hilliard and Donnelly and the Belgian ladies. Then Atuele came over and gave each of the four a dose of an herbal preparation. Farquahar, who was not having a ceremony this evening, did not get an herb to eat. Hilliard’s portion was a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg, and it did taste much as Donnelly had described it. Lawn clippings left in a pile for a few days, with an aftertaste of something else. Dirt, say.
He sat with it on his tongue like a communion wafer, wondering if he was supposed to chew it. Tasty, he thought, and he considered voicing the thought to ei
ther Donnelly or Farquahar, but something told him not to say anything to anyone from this point on but to be silent and let this happen, whatever it was. He chewed the stuff and swallowed it, and if anything the taste got worse the more you chewed it, but he had no trouble getting it down.
He waited for it to hit him.
Nothing happened. Meanwhile, though, the drumming was beginning to have an effect on a couple of the women in the crowd. Several of them had risen from the benches and were standing near the drummers, shuffling their feet to the intricate beat.
Then one of them went into an altered state. It happened quite suddenly. Her movements became jerky, almost spastic, and her eyes rolled up into her head, and she danced with great authority, her whole body taken over by the dance. She made her way throughout the assembly, pausing now and then in front of someone. The person approached would extend a hand, palm up, and she would slap palms forcefully before dancing on.
The people whose palms were slapped mostly stayed where they were and went on as before, but periodically the slappee would be immediately taken over by whatever was in possession of the dancer. Then he or she—it was mostly women, but not exclusively so—he or she would rise and go through the same sort of fitful gyrations as the original dancer, and would soon be approaching others and slapping their palms.
Like vampires making new vampires, Hilliard thought.
One woman, eyes rolling, brow dripping sweat, danced over to the row of armchairs. Hilliard at once hoped and feared he’d get his palm slapped. Instead it was Donnelly she approached, Donnelly whose palm received her slap. Hilliard fancied that electricity flowed from the woman into the man beside him, but Donnelly did not react. He went on sitting there.
Meanwhile, Atuele had taken one of the Belgian women over to the drummers. He had her holding a white metal basin on top of her head. A group of Africans were dancing around her, dancing at her, it seemed to Hilliard. The woman just stood there balancing the dishpan on her head and looking uncomfortable about it.
Her companion, Hilliard saw, was dancing by herself, shuffling her feet.
Another dancer approached. She went down the row, a dynamo of whatever energy the dance generated, and she slapped palms with Donnelly, with Hilliard, with Farquahar. Donnelly received the slap as he’d received the first. Hilliard felt something, felt energy leap from the dancer into his hand and up his arm. It was like getting an electrical shock, and yet it wasn’t.
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