What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  When she returned to Seattle, she began to worry about Duluma. He was calling more often, agitated, issuing threats into her answering machine. She would hear noises outside her apartment at night, and once Duluma had left a note under her door, a crazed jumble of accusations and pleadings. When she told me of these developments I urged her to return to Atlanta, to me. She couldn’t, she said. She had finals coming up, and anyway, she had her brothers to call upon in case she felt unsafe.

  I decided to call this Duluma, to talk about his behavior, and when I did, the results were satisfying. Because I suppose I am always hoping to find a compromise, to find calm and agreement where there is rancor, I spoke to him with empathy and with an eye toward reconciliation for all three of us. And before the conversation was over, I have to say that we were friendly. I felt I could trust him and that he had reached a new equilibrium. He said that he had come to grips with her seeing me—he had called around and asked about me, and now that he knew about me, knew I was a good man, he was content. He was ready to let her go, he said, and I thanked him for being such a good man about it all. It is not easy to let go of a woman you cherish, I said, though I still found him to be a disagreeable and excitable man. We said goodnight as friends, and he asked me to call him again some day. I said I would, though I had no intention of doing so.

  I called Tabitha afterward, and we laughed about the twisted mind of Duluma, about how perhaps some nerve gas had depleted his faculties during his SPLA days. I remember wanting so desperately to be with Tabitha that day. She was merry on the phone, and dismissive of Duluma and his wild talk, but she was concerned and I was concerned. I wanted to fly to her, or bring her to me, and I will always curse my hesitance to do so. She was in Seattle and I was here in Atlanta, and we let this distance remain between us. I could have easily left this city for hers; there is little here to keep me. But she was in college, and I wanted to finish the semester’s classes, and so we felt compelled to stay where we were. I cannot count the times I have cursed our lack of urgency. If ever I love again, I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

  I am standing outside the door to my own apartment, and I don’t think I will go inside after all. I don’t know what I was thinking in going home. In there, my blood will still be on the carpet, and I will be alone. Could I visit Edgardo? I have never been in his home, and it seems a poor time to visit unannounced.

  I want to leave, go away from here in my car, but the keys to my car are inside the apartment. I spend a few seconds debating whether I can bear to be in the apartment long enough to get them. I decide that I can, and so I turn the key.

  Inside, I can smell the strawberry memory of Tonya, and beneath it, the boy. What is his smell? It is a sweet smell, a boy smell, the smell of a boy’s restless sleep. I keep my head high, refusing to glance at my blood on the floor, or at the couch cushions that may still be on the carpet. I find my keys on the kitchen counter, sweep them into my hand, and quickly leave. Even the sound of the door closing is different now.

  I get into my car. I decide that I could sleep here, in the parking lot, for an hour, before I need to go to work. But here I am too close to them, the attackers, their car, the Christian neighbors, everyone who participated in or ignored what happened. I stumble through the possibilities. I could drive to a park and sleep. I could find a place to eat breakfast. I could drive to the Newtons’ house.

  This feels like the right idea. When I began working and studying, I saw the Newtons less, but their door, they said, would always be open. Now, this morning, I know I need to be there. I will knock lightly on their window, the one by the kitchen’s breakfast nook, and Gerald, who wakes up very early, will come to the door and welcome me in. I will nap on their couch, the brown modular one in the TV room, for one luxurious hour, smelling the house’s aroma of dogs and garlic and air freshener. I will feel safe and loved, even though the rest of the Newtons won’t know I was there until I am gone.

  I drive to their house, only a few miles away, leaving the disarray I live in, by the highway and amid the chain stores, and entering the shaded and winding roads where the lawns are expansive, the fences immaculate, the mailboxes shaped like miniature barns. When I first came to know the Newtons, I spent two or three days a week at the their house, eating dinner there, spending whole weekends together. We went on outings to Atlanta Braves games, to the zoo, to movies. They were a very busy family—Gerald was on the boards of three nonprofits and worked constantly, Anne was active in their church—and so I began to feel guilt about the time they created for me. But I felt that I was helping Allison to understand certain things, about the war and Sudan and Africa and even Alessandro, so perhaps it was somewhat mutually beneficial. I had known them a few months when we took a picture outside their house, on their lawn, Allison sitting on the grass, me standing with Anne and Gerald.

  —For the Christmas card, they said.

  Had I heard right? They would put me on their Christmas card? They sent it to me ten days later, the picture we had taken mounted on a green folding card, the four of us smiling in their lush yard. Inside, they had printed: Happy Holidays and Peace in the New Year, from Gerald, Anne, Allison, and Dominic (our new friend from Sudan). I was very proud to have that card, and proud that they would include me in such a way. I kept it on my wall, taped there in my bedroom over my end table. I originally displayed it in our living room, but Sudanese friends visiting me had occasionally felt jealous. It is not polite to show off these sorts of friendships.

  Thinking about the card warms me to the idea of walking under the arched doorway of the Newtons’ home, but when I arrive at their house, the plan seems ridiculous. What am I doing? It’s 4:48 a.m., and I’m parked outside their darkened house. I look for lights on inside, and there are none. This is the refugee way—not knowing the limits of our hosts’ generosity. I am going to knock on their door at nearly five in the morning? I have lost my head.

  I drive up the street, now a block away, so they won’t see me if anyone inside does wake up. I decide I will simply wait here until it’s time to go to work. I can get there early, shower, perhaps buy a new shirt and pair of pants in the pro shop. I receive a 30 percent discount on all clothing, and have taken advantage of this before. I will clean myself up and buy the clothes and look presentable and tell no one what happened. I am tired of needing help. I need help in Atlanta, I needed help in Ethiopia and Kakuma, and I am tired of it. I am tired of watching families, visiting families, being at once part and not part of these families.

  A few weeks after I spoke to Duluma, and laughed about Duluma with Tabitha, I was with Bobby Newmyer again in Los Angeles. He was holding a gathering of Lost Boys at the University of Judaism. Fourteen Lost Boys from around the United States had flown in to talk about plans for a national organization, a website that would track the progress of all the members of the diaspora, perhaps a unified action or statement regarding Darfur. We were just sitting down to begin the morning’s discussions when my phone rang. Because we Lost Boys all seem to have a problem with our mobile phones—we feel that they must be answered immediately, no matter the circumstances—rules had been imposed: no calls during the meetings. So I did not take Tabitha’s call. During our first break, I checked the message in the hallway. It had been left at ten-thirty that morning.

  ‘Achak, where are you?’ she asked. ‘Call me back immediately.’ I called her back, and reached her voice mail. I was going to be busy that day, I told her. I’ll call you after the meetings are over. She called again, but by then I had turned my phone off. At four o’clock, when I turned my phone on again, the first call was from Achor Achor.

  ‘Have you heard anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Anything about what?’

  He paused for a long moment. ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said.

  He called back a few minutes
later.

  ‘Have you heard anything about Tabitha?’ he asked.

  I told him I had not. He hung up again. My only guess was that Tabitha had been trying to reach me through Achor Achor, and that she had gotten upset, perhaps even said some things about my remoteness, callousness. She said such things whenever she wanted to reach me and could not.

  The phone rang again and it was Achor Achor.

  He told me what he knew: that Tabitha was dead, that Duluma had killed her. She had been staying in the apartment of her friend Veronica, where she had gone to be safe from Duluma. Duluma had found her, called, and threatened to come over. Tabitha was defiant, and despite Veronica’s protestations, she dared him to come over. Veronica did not want to open the door but Tabitha was unafraid. Holding Veronica’s baby in the crook of her arm, she released the door’s lock. ‘I’ll handle this poor man,’ she told Veronica, and she opened the door. Duluma leapt through it, holding a knife. He stabbed Tabitha between her ribs, sending the baby soaring. As Veronica recovered her child, Duluma threw Tabitha to the floor. Veronica watched, helpless, as Duluma sank his knife into Tabitha twenty-two times. Finally he slowed and stopped. He stood, breathing heavily. He looked to Veronica and smiled a tired smile. ‘I have to be sure she’s dead,’ he said, and he waited, standing above the body of Tabitha.

  After Tabitha was dead, Duluma walked out of the apartment and threw himself off an overpass. I asked Achor Achor if he was dead. He was not dead. He was in a hospital, his back broken.

  I left the conference and walked alone for some time, where the campus overlooked the highway. The road was busy with cars, loud with speed and indifference. It was too soon to believe, to feel. I was sure, though, in that hour I spent alone that I was alone completely. I lived without God, even for a time, and the thoughts I entertained were the darkest my mind had ever known.

  I returned to the conference and told Bobby and a few other men what had happened. The conference ended that day and they tried to comfort me. I wanted to fly directly to Seattle but was told by Achor Achor not to. The family was too upset, he said, and her brothers did not want to see me. I could not yet contemplate the reality of her death, so on that first day I thought about causes and solutions, vengeance and faith.

  ‘God has a problem with me,’ I told Bobby. We were driving home from the conference. He said nothing for some time, and his silence meant to me that he agreed.

  ‘No, no!’ he finally said. ‘That’s not true. It’s just—’

  But I was sure that there was a message being directed to me.

  ‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ Bobby said.

  I told him there was no need for him to be sorry.

  Bobby fumbled for answers, and urged me not to blame myself, or to read anything about God’s intentions into Tabitha’s murder. But many times during that drive he banged his steering wheel and yelled, and ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘Maybe it’s this stupid country,’ he said. ‘Maybe we just make people crazy.’

  This was four months ago today. Though whispered doubts have ringed my head and though I have had certain godless hours, my faith has not been altered, because I have never felt God’s direct intervention in any affairs at all. Perhaps I did not receive that sort of training from my teachers, that he is guiding the winds that knock us down or carry us. And yet, with this news, as we drove, I found myself distancing myself from God. I have had friends who I decided were not good friends, were people who brought more trouble than happiness, and thus I have found ways to create more distance between us. Now I have the same thoughts about God, my faith, that I had for these friends. God is in my life but I do not depend on him. My God is not a reliable God.

  Tabitha, I will love you until I see you again. There are provisions for lovers like us, I am sure of it. In the afterlife, whatever its form, there are provisions. I know you were unsure about me, that you had not yet chosen me above all others, but now that you are gone, allow me to assume that you were on your way to deciding that I was the one. Or perhaps that’s the wrong way to think. I know you entertained calls from other men, men besides me and Duluma. We were young. We had not made plans.

  Tabitha, I pray for you often. I have been reading Mother Teresa and Brother Roger’s book called Seeking the Heart of God, and each time I revisit it, I find different passages that seem written for me, describing what I feel in your absence. In the book, Brother Roger says this to me: ‘Four hundred years after Christ, a believer named Augustine lived in North Africa. He had experienced misfortunes, the death of his loved ones. One day he was able to say to Christ: ‘Light of my heart, do not let my darkness speak to me.’ In his trials, St. Augustine realized that the presence of the Risen Christ had never left him; it was the light in the midst of his darkness.’

  There have been times when those words have helped me and times when I found those words hollow and unconvincing. These authors, for whom I have great respect, still do not seem to know the doubts that one might have in the angriest corners of one’s soul. Too often they tell me to answer my doubts with prayer, which seems very much like addressing one’s hunger by thinking of food. But still, even when I am frustrated, I look elsewhere and can find a new passage that speaks to me. There is this, from Mother Teresa: ‘Suffering, if it is accepted together, borne together, is joy. Remember that the passion of Christ ends always in the joy of the resurrection of Christ, so when you feel in your own heart the suffering of Christ, remember the resurrection has yet to come—the joy of Easter has to dawn.’ And she provides a prayer that I have prayed many times in these last weeks, and that I whisper tonight in my car, on this street of overhanging trees and amber streetlights.

  Lord Jesus, make us realize

  that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves

  and our self-centered desires

  that we can come to live more fully;

  for it is only by dying with you that we can rise with you.

  Tabitha, these past months without you, when first I wondered where you might be, whether you were in heaven or hell or some purgatory, I have had the most intolerable thoughts, homicidal and suicidal. I have struggled so fiercely with the harm I have wanted to do to Duluma and the futility I have seen, in my darkest minutes, in living. I have found some respite in the nightly consumption of alcohol. Two bottles of beer typically allow me to sleep, if fitfully. Achor Achor has been worried about me, but he has seen me improve. He knows I have been here before, that I have approached the precipice of self-termination and have walked away.

  I never told you of those dark days, Tabitha, when I was much younger. Achor Achor does not know, either, and had he and I been together then I might not have fallen so low. We had been separated at Golkur, though both of us were on our way to Kenya, to Kakuma. We were on the same road, but days apart. The last I had seen Achor Achor he was in a Save the Children medical tent, being treated for dehydration. I had been cowardly; I thought he would surely die and I could not bear it. I ran away and did not say goodbye. I left the camp with another group, wanting to be away from his imminent death, from all death, and so I walked with one of the first groups into the wind and desert that awaited us in Kenya.

  In those last days of my walk, Tabitha, I walked in the dark. My eyes were nearly swollen shut, and I walked blind, trying to lift my feet to avoid tripping, but finding myself barely able to drag them across the gravel. My head swam with fatigue and disorientation, just as it does this morning, Tabitha, when I have been beaten and I miss you. That night, when I walked as such a young boy, it seemed a good time to die. I could continue to live, yes, but my days were getting worse, not better. My life in Pinyudo worsened as the years went on, and Achor Achor, I feared, was dead. And now this, walking to Kenya, where there were no promises. I remembered my thoughts about buildings and waterfalls in Ethiopia, and my disappointment when, after crossing the border, I found only more of the blight we thought we had left. For many years, God had been clear to boys li
ke us. Our lives were not worth much. God had found innumerable ways to kill boys like me, and He no doubt would find many more. Kenya’s leadership could turn over just as Ethiopia’s had, and there would be another Gilo River, and I knew that would be too much to bear. I knew that if that came again, I would not find the strength to run or swim or carry a quiet baby.

  So that night I stopped walking. I sat and watched the boys shuffle by. Just to stop was such a great relief. I was so tired. I was far more tired than I had realized, and when I sat on the hot road I felt relief greater than any I had known before. And because my body so welcomed this rest, I wondered if, like William K, I could simply close my eyes and pass away. I didn’t feel so close to falling from this world to the next, but perhaps William K did not, either. William K had only sat down to rest, and moments later was gone. So I lay my head back on the road and I looked into the sky.

  —Hey, get up. You’ll get run over.

  It was the voice of a boy passing by. I said nothing.

  —You all right?

  —I’m fine, I said.—Walk on, please.

  It was a very clear night, the stars carelessly splashed across the sky.

  I closed my eyes, Tabitha, and I conjured my mother as best I could. I pictured her in yellow, yellow like an evening sun, walking down the path. I loved to watch her walk down the path toward me, and in my vision I allowed her to walk the entire way. When she came to me I told her I was too tired to continue, that I would suffer again, and would watch others suffer, and then wait to suffer again. In my vision she said nothing, for I didn’t know what my mother would say to all that, so I let her remain silent. Then I washed her from my mind. It seemed to me that to die I needed to clear my mind of all thoughts, all visions, and concentrate on passing on.