What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  Now the process of removing our belongings begins. Powder has made a cradle of his arms and his accomplice is stacking our possessions there—first the microwave, now the laptop, now the stereo. When the pile reaches his chin, the woman walks to the front door and opens it.

  ‘Fuck!’ she says, closing the door quickly.

  She tells Powder that outside is a police car, parked in our lot. The car is, in fact, blocking their own car’s exit.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ she spits.

  This panic goes on for some time, and soon they take positions on either side of the curtained window that looks out on the courtyard. I gather from their conversation that the cop is talking to a Latino man, but that the officer’s body language seems to indicate that the matter is not pressing. The woman and Powder express growing confidence and relief in the fact that the police officer is not there for them. But then why won’t he leave? they want to know. ‘Why doesn’t that motherfucker go do his job?’ she asks.

  They settle in to wait. The bleeding from my forehead seems to have subsided. With my tongue, I explore the damage to my mouth. One of my lower front teeth is chipped, and a molar has been smashed; it feels jagged, a saw-toothed mountain range. But I can’t worry about dental matters. We Sudanese are not known for the perfection of our teeth.

  I look up to find that the woman and Powder have my backpack, which contains nothing but my homework from Georgia Perimeter College. Imagining the time it will take to reproduce those notebooks, now so close to midterm exams, almost brings me to my feet again. I stare at my visitors with as much hatred as I can muster, as my god will allow.

  I am a fool. Why did I open that door? I have an African-American friend here in Atlanta, Mary, a friend only, and she will laugh about this. Not a week ago, she was in this very room, sitting on my couch, and with Achor Achor we were watching The Exorcist. Achor Achor and I had long wanted to see it. We have an interest in the concept of evil, I admit it, and the idea of an exorcism had intrigued us. Though we felt that our faith was strong and we had received a thorough Catholic education, we had never heard of an exorcism performed by a Catholic priest. So we watched the film, and it terrified us both. Achor Achor didn’t make it past the first twenty minutes. Retreating to his room, he closed the door, turned on his stereo, and worked on his algebra homework. In one scene in the film, there is a knock on the door, boding ill, and a question occurred to me. I paused the movie and Mary sighed patiently; she is accustomed to me stopping while walking or driving to ask a question—Why do the people ask for money in the highway medians? Are all of the offices in those buildings occupied? —and at that moment I asked Mary who, in America, answers when there is a knock at the door.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Is it the man, or the woman?’ I asked.

  She scoffed. ‘The man,’ she said. ‘The man. The man is the protector, right?’ she said. ‘Of course the man answers the door. Why?’

  ‘In Sudan,’ I said, ‘it cannot be the man. It is always the woman who answers the door, because when there is a knock, someone has come for the man.’

  Ah, I have found another chipped tooth. My friends are still by the window, periodically parting the curtains, finding the cop still there, and cursing for a few minutes before settling back into their slump-shouldered vigil.

  An hour has passed and now I’m curious about the business of the police officer in the parking lot. I begin to harbor hopes that the cop does indeed know about the robbery, and in the interest of avoiding a standoff, is simply waiting for my friends to exit. But why, then, advertise his presence? Perhaps the officer is at the complex to investigate the drug dealers in C4? The men in unit C4 are white, though, and as far as I can ascertain, the man the officer is talking to is Edgardo, who lives in C13, eight doors from my own. Edgardo is a mechanic and is my friend; he has saved me, according to his estimate, $2,200 in car repairs over the two years we have been neighbors. In exchange, I have given him rides to church, to work, to the North DeKalb Mall. He has his own car, but he prefers not to drive it. I have not seen its axles bearing tires in at least six months. He loves to work on his car, and does not mind working on mine, a 2001 Corolla. When he is working on my car, Edgardo insists that I entertain him. ‘Tell me stories,’ he says, because he doesn’t like the music they play on the radio. ‘Everywhere in the country they play norte music, but not in Atlanta. What am I doing here? This is no city for a lover of music. Tell me a story, Valentino. Talk to me, talk to me. Tell some stories.’

  The first time he asked, I began telling him my own story, which began when the rebels, men who would eventually join the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, first raided my father’s shop in Marial Bai. I was six years old, and the rebel presence seemed to grow in our village every month. They were tolerated by most, discouraged by others. My father was a wealthy man by regional standards, the owner of a general store in our town and another shop a few days’ walk away. He had been a rebel himself, years before, but now he was a businessman, and wanted no trouble. He wanted no revolution, he had no quarrel with the Islamists in Khartoum. They were not bothering him, he said, they were half a world away. He wanted only to sell grain, corn, sugar, pots, fabric, candy.

  I was in his shop, playing on the floor one day. There was a commotion above my head. Three men, two of them carrying rifles, were demanding to take what they wanted. They claimed it was for the good of the rebellion, that they would bring about a New Sudan.

  ‘No, no,’ Edgardo said. ‘No fighting. I don’t want all the fighting. I read three newspapers a day.’ He pointed to the papers spread underneath the car, now brown with grease. ‘I get enough of that. I know about your war. Tell me some other story. Tell me how you got that name, Valentine. That’s a strange name for a guy from Africa, don’t you think?’

  So I told him the story of my baptism. This was in my hometown. I was about six years old. The baptism was the idea of my Uncle Jok; my parents, who opposed Christian ideas, did not attend. They were believers in the traditional religious ideas of my clan, and the village’s experiments with Christianity were limited to the young, like Jok, and those, like me, who they could entice. Conversion was a sacrifice for any man, given that Father Dominic Matong, a Sudanese man who had been ordained by Italian missionaries, forbade polygamy. My father, who had many wives, rejected the new religion on these grounds, and also because to him the Christians seemed preoccupied with written language. My father and mother could not read; not many people his age could.—You go to your Church of Books, he said.—You’ll come back when your senses return.

  I was wearing a white robe, surrounded by Jok and his wife Adeng, when Father Matong asked his questions. He had walked two days from Aweil to baptize me and three other boys, each of whom followed me. It was the most nervous I had ever been. The other boys I knew said it was nothing compared to facing a beating from their father, but I did not know such a situation; my father never raised his hand to me.

  Facing Jok and Adeng, Father Matong held his Bible in one hand and raised his other palm in the air.—Do you, with whole your heart and faith, offer your child to be baptized and to become faithful member of the family of God?

  —We do! they said.

  I leapt when they said this. It was far louder than I had expected.

  —By so doing, have you rejected Satan with all his might, deceit, and unfaithfulness?

  —We do!

  —Do you believe in Jesus, the son of God, borne by the Virgin Mary, he who suffered and was crucified and who on the third day ascended from the dead to save us from our sins?

  —We do!

  And then cold and clean water was poured over my head. Father Matong had brought it with him on his two-day walk from Aweil.

  With my baptism came my Christian name, Valentine, chosen by Father Matong. Many boys went by their Christian names, but in my case, this name was rarely used, as no one, including myself, could pronounce it. We said Valdino, Baldero, Be
nedeeno. It was not until I found myself in a refugee camp in Ethiopia that the name was used by anyone who knew me. It was then that, improbably, after years of war, I saw Father Matong again. It was then that he reminded me of my Christian name, told me of its provenance, and demonstrated how to speak it aloud.

  Edgardo liked this story a great deal. He had not known until that moment that I was a Catholic like him. We made plans to attend a Mass together some day, but we have not yet done so.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘Look at this guy. Bleeding from his head and looking so mad!’

  Powder is addressing me. He is still at the window, but his accomplice is in the bathroom, where she has been for some time. With this development, her use of my bathroom, I now feel sure that this apartment will have to be abandoned. Their violation of it is now complete. I would like to burn this place down the moment they leave.

  ‘Hey Tonya, come out here and look at the Nigerian prince. What’s the matter, man? You never been robbed before?’

  Now she is staring at me, too. Her name is Tonya.

  ‘Get used to it, Africa,’ she said.

  It occurs to me that the longer the police officer is in the parking lot, the better the chance is that I will be discovered. As long as the cop is there, the chance remains that Achor Achor could return, or Edgardo might knock on my door. He has only knocked on my door a few times before—he prefers the phone—but it is not impossible. If he knocked on the door, there could be no disguising what was happening here.

  My cell phone rings. Tonya and Powder let it ring. Minutes later, it rings again. It must be five o’clock.

  ‘Look at this pimp,’ Powder says, ‘his phone’s ringing every minute. You some kind of pimp, prince?’

  If I had not set rules, the phone would ring without end. There is a circle of perhaps three hundred Sudanese in the U.S. who keep in touch, me with them but more often them with me, and we do so in a way that might be considered excessive. They all think I have some kind of direct line to the rebels, the SPLA. They call me to confirm any rumors, to get my opinion on any developments. Before I insisted that any calls to me be limited to between five o’clock and nine, I would get an average of seventy calls a day. I am not one prone to exaggeration. The calls do not stop. Any five-minute conversation can be expected to be interrupted eight or nine times by more calls. Bol will call from Phoenix, and while I talk to him about a visa for his brother who has made it to Cairo, James will call from San Jose, and he will need money. We share information about jobs, car loans, insurance, weddings, events in southern Sudan. When John Garang, the leader of the SPLA and the man who more or less began the civil war, died in a helicopter crash this past July, the calls obeyed no limits or hours. I was on the phone, without break, for four days. Yet I knew nothing more than anyone else.

  In many cases, the Lost Boys of Sudan have no one else. The Lost Boys is not a nickname appreciated by many among our ranks, but it is apt enough. We fled or were sent from our homes, many of us orphaned, and thousands of us wandered through deserts and forests for what seemed like years. In many ways we are alone and in most cases we are unsure of where exactly we’re going. While in Kakuma, one of the largest and most remote refugee camps in the world, we found new families, or many of us did. I lived with a teacher from my hometown, and when, after two years, he brought his family to the camp, we had what resembled a family. There were five boys and three girls. I called them sisters. We walked to school together, we retrieved water together. But with our relocation to the United States, again it is just boys. There are very few Sudanese women in the U.S., and very few elders, and thus we rely on each other for virtually everything. This has its disadvantages, for very frequently, we are sharing unfounded rumors and abject paranoia.

  When we first arrived here, we stayed in our apartments for weeks, venturing out only when necessary. One of our friends, who had been in the U.S. longer than we had, had just been assaulted on his way home. I am sad to say that again it was young African-American men, and this set us wondering how we were being perceived. We felt watched, pursued. We Sudanese are recognizable; we look like no one else on Earth. We do not even look like anyone else from East Africa. The isolation of many parts of southern Sudan has ensured that our bloodline has remained largely unaltered. We stayed inside those weeks, worried not only about predatory young men but also that the U.S. immigration officials would change their minds about us. It’s amusing to think about now, how naïve we were, how skewed our perspective was. Anything seemed possible. Should we become too visible, or if a few of us ran into some kind of trouble, it seemed perfectly likely that we would all promptly be returned to Africa. Or perhaps just imprisoned. Achor Achor thought we could be executed if they found out that we had once been affiliated with the SPLA. At Kakuma, many of us lied on our application forms and in our interviews with officials. We knew that if we admitted affiliation with the SPLA, we would not be sent to Atlanta, North Dakota, Detroit. We would remain in Kakuma. So those of us who needed to lie, lied. The SPLA had been a part of our lives from early on, and over half of the young men who call themselves Lost Boys were child soldiers to some degree or another. But this is a part of our history that we have been told not to talk about.

  So we stayed inside. We watched television most of the day and night, interrupted only by naps and occasional games of chess. One of the men living with us in those days had never seen television, outside of a few glimpses in Kakuma. I had watched television in Kakuma and in Nairobi, but had never seen anything like the 120 channels we had been provided in that first apartment. It was far too much to absorb in in one day, or two or three. We watched almost without pause for a week, and at the end of that period, we were exhilarated, disheartened, thoroughly confused. One of us would venture out at dusk for food and whatever else we needed, fearing always that we, too, would be victims of an assault by young African-American men.

  Though the Sudanese elders had warned us of crime in the United States, this sort of thing was not part of our official orientation. When, after ten years, we finally were told we would be leaving the camp, we were given a two-day course in what we would see and hear in the United States. An American named Sasha told us about American currency, about job training, cars, about paying rent, about air conditioning and public transportation and snow. Many of us were being sent to climates like Fargo and Seattle, and to illustrate, Sasha passed around ice. Many of the members of the class had never held ice. I had, but only because I was a youth leader at the camp, and in the UN compound had seen many things, including the storerooms of food, the athletic equipment donated by Japan and Sweden, the films of Bruce Willis. But while Sasha told us that in America even the most successful men can have but one wife at once—my father had six—and talked about escalators, indoor plumbing, and the various laws of the land, he did not warn us that I would be told by American teenagers that I should go back to Africa. The first time it happened, I was on a bus.

  A few months after I arrived, we began venturing out from the apartment, in part because we had been given only enough money to live for three months, and now we needed to find work. This was January of 2002, and I was working at Best Buy, in the storeroom. I was riding home at 8 p.m., after changing buses three times (the job would not last, for it took me ninety minutes to travel eighteen miles). But on that day I was content enough. I was making $8.50 an hour and there were two other Sudanese at that Best Buy, all of us in the storeroom, carting plasma TVs and dishwashing machines. I was exhausted and riding home and looking forward to watching a tape that had been circulating among the Lost Boys in Atlanta; someone had filmed the recent wedding, in Kansas City, of a well-known Sudanese man to a Sudanese woman I had met in Kakuma. I was about to get off at my stop when two African-American teenagers spoke to me.

  ‘Yo,’ one of the boys said to me. ‘Yo freak, where you from?’ I turned and told him I was from Sudan. This gave him pause. Sudan is not well-known, or was not well-known until the wa
r the Islamists brought to us twenty years ago, with its proxy armies, its untethered militias, was brought, in 2003, to Darfur.

  ‘You know,’ the teenager said, tilting his head and sizing me up, ‘you’re one of those Africans who sold us out.’ He went on in this vein for some time, and it became clear that he thought I was responsible for the enslaving of his ancestors. Accordingly, he and his friend followed me for a block, talking to my back, again suggesting that I go back to Africa. This idea has been posed to Achor Achor, too, and now my two guests have said it. Just a moment ago, Powder looked at me with some compassion and asked, ‘Man, why you even here? You coming here to wear your suits and act like you’re all educated? Didn’t you know you were gonna get got here?’

  Though I have a low opinion of the teenagers who harassed me, I am more tolerant of this sort of experience than some of my fellow Sudanese. It is a terrible thing, the assumptions that Africans develop about African-Americans. We watch American films and we come to this country assuming that African-Americans are drug dealers and bank robbers. The Sudanese elders in Kakuma told us in no uncertain terms to stay clear of African-Americans, the women in particular. How surprised they would have been to learn that the first and most important person to come to our aid in Atlanta was an African-American woman who wanted only to connect us to more people who could help. We were, it should be noted, confused about this help; in some ways we saw it as our right, even while we questioned others who needed assistance. In Atlanta, when we saw people out of work, homeless people or young men drinking on corners or in cars, we said, ‘Go to work! You have hands, now work!’ But that was before we started looking for jobs ourselves, and certainly before we realized that working at Best Buy would not in any way facilitate our goals of college or beyond.