2006 - What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  I should have been concerned about Tabitha, about whether or not she would appear that day at the rehearsal, but I had not yet processed the night before. When Tabitha arrived that afternoon at the theater, I was so entranced by memories of the night before that I barely noticed the real Tabitha, who was purposely ignoring me. Sometime in the night she had decided to be mad at me again. She would continue to fume for weeks to come.

  On the night of our performance, the theater was full. There were eighteen different groups performing, from all over Kenya. Ours was the only troupe of refugees. I thank the Lord that we performed well that night; we remembered our lines and under the lights, with all those seats, we still found a way to be present in the words and drama of the play we had written. We did well, we knew we did well. When we finished, the audience cheered and some people stood and clapped. Our group placed third overall. We could not have asked for more.

  Afterward, there was a celebratory dinner, and then we all went to our sponsors’ homes. Even on the walk there the struggle was evident on my face.

  —What’s the matter? Grace asked.—You look like you ate something sour.

  I told her it was nothing, but I was a wreck. I knew that I had only this night to speak to Mike and Grace about the possibility of his sponsoring me.

  But I said nothing to Grace, and nothing to either of them as they washed up before bed. Grace went to sleep and Mike did, too, before he returned to the living room.—Couldn’t sleep, he said.

  We sat on the couch that night watching television for hours more, and while I asked him questions about what we saw—who are the men in the curved hats? who are the women wearing feathers?—all I could think was Could I? Could I really ask him such a thing? I could not ask such a thing of Mike. It was far too much, I knew. Mike was too busy to be burdened with a refugee. But then again, I thought, I could be such a help. There were so many things I could do to earn my keep. I could cook and clean and certainly help in any way the theater needed me. I was organized, I had proven that, and I was well liked, and I could clean the theater after it closed, or clean it before it opened. I could do either or both, and afterward, could come home and turn down the bed for Mike and Grace. Certainly Mike would know all the things that I would be willing to do. He knew that I would be willing to work for my room and board, to make it advantageous to have me around.

  I cursed my stupidity. Mike did not need or want someone to help with all that. He wanted to be a young man unencumbered by the plight of a gangly Sudanese teenager. This was his good deed, this week of hosting me, and that was enough. If my mother knew I was even contemplating imposing on someone in such a way, she would be so ashamed.

  —Well, this is the end of the night for me, he said, and stood.

  —Okay, I said.

  —You staying up again? he asked.—I don’t know when you sleep. I smiled and opened my mouth. A tumble of words, obsequious and needful words, were so close to leaving my mouth. But I said nothing.

  —Good night, I said.—Your hospitality has meant everything to me.

  He smiled and went to bed, to join Grace.

  We went home the next morning, all of us refugees from Kakuma. Everyone was tired; I was not the only one who had developed a taste for television. I did not sit near Tabitha, and did not speak to her the entire ride back. It was just as well. I was drowning in so many thoughts and needed a rest from her, from any reminder of the choices I had not made. I rested my head on the glass, trying to sleep it all away. We did not stop at Ketale this time, instead driving straight through to Kakuma. I slipped in and out of consciousness, watching the lush parts of Kenya pass by, its great green hills and sheets of rain drenching far-off farms. We flew past all that and back to the howling mess of Kakuma.

  CHAPTER 24

  I am in the parking lot of the Century Club and there are twenty minutes before the gym opens. There is not enough time to nap, even if I were able, so I turn on the radio and find the BBC World News. This program has been a part of my life for so long, since Pinyudo, when the SPLA commanders would blast its reports from Africa across the camp. In the past few years, it seems that no BBC World News broadcast has been complete without an item on Sudan. This morning there is first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.

  The second Sudan story is more fascinating; it concerns a yacht. It seems that the African Union was to meet in Khartoum, and el-Bashir, the president of Sudan, wanted to impress the heads of state with an extravagant boat, which would be docked in the Nile and would carry the dignitaries up and down the river during their stay. The vessel was ordered from Slovenia, and Bashir paid $4.5 million for it. It goes without saying that $4.5 million would be useful in feeding the poor of Sudan.

  The yacht was transported from Slovenia to the Red Sea, where it sailed to Port Sudan. From Port Sudan, it needed to be transported overland to Khartoum in time for the conference. But getting it to the capitol proved far more difficult than anticipated. The 172-ton boat challenged the bridges it had to be driven over, and the overhead electrical wires along the way were problematic; 132 of them had to be cut down and reassembled after the yacht had passed. By the time the yacht was within sight of the Nile, the leaders of Africa had come and gone. They had somehow managed without the yacht and its satellite TVs, fine china, and staterooms.

  But before the boat reached Khartoum, it had become a symbol for how decadent and callous Bashir is. The man has enemies from all sides—it is not only the southern Sudanese who despise him. Moderate Muslims do, too, and have formed a number of political parties and coalitions to oppose him. In Darfur it was a non-Arab Muslim group, after all, who rose up against his government, with a variety of demands for the region. If genocide does not incite the people of Sudan to replace this madman, and the whole National Islamic Front that controls Khartoum, perhaps the boat will.

  As I have been listening to the radio report, I have been staring across the parking lot to a pay phone, and now I see it as an invitation. I decide that I should call my own number, to ring my stolen phone. I have nothing to lose in doing so.

  I use one of the phone cards I bought from Achor Achor’s cousin in Nashville. He sells $5 phone cards that in fact give the user $100 worth of international long distance. I don’t know how it works, but these cards are bought by all the refugees I know. The one I have is very strange, and was probably not made by Africans: it bears an unusual montage: a Maori tribesman in full regalia, spear in hand, with an American buffalo in the background. Over the images are the words AFRICA CALIFORNIA.

  It takes me a moment to remember my own number; I have not called it often. When I do remember it, I dial the first six digits quickly and pause for a long moment before finishing the cycle. I often cannot believe the things I do.

  It rings. My throat pounds. Two rings, three. A click.

  ‘Hello?’ A boy’s voice. Michael. TV Boy.

  ‘Michael. It is the man you stole from last night.’

  A quick small gasp, then silence.

  ‘Michael, let me talk to you. I just want you to see that—’

  The phone is dropped, and I hear the sound of Michael speaking in an echo-giving room. I hear muffled voices and then ‘Gimme that.’ A button is pushed and the call ends.

  I gave the police officer this number and now I know that they did not try to call it even once. The phone is still in possession of the people who stole it, those who robbed and beat me, and this phone is still working. The police did not bother to investigate the crime, and the criminals knew the police would do nothi
ng. This is the moment, above any other, when I wonder if I actually exist. If one of the parties involved, the police or the criminals, believed that I had worth or a voice, then this phone would have been disposed of. But it seems clear that there has been no acknowledgment of my existence on either side of this crime.

  Five minutes later, after I have returned to my car to catch my breath, I return to the pay phone to try my number again. I am not surprised when the call goes directly to voicemail. Out of habit, I type in my access code to listen to my own messages.

  There are three. The first is from Madelena, the admissions officer at a small Jesuit college I visited months ago and which all but promised me entry at that time. Since then, they seem to have arrived at a dozen or more reasons why my application is incomplete. First, they said, my transcript was not official enough; I had sent a copy, when they needed a certified original. Then I had failed to take a certain test that earlier they told me was unnecessary. And all the while, every time I have tried to reach Madelena on the phone, she has been gone. Periodically, though, she calls me back, always at an hour when she knows I will not pick up. I am not sure how she does it. She is a master at this. This message is more informative than any other:

  ‘Valentine, I’ve talked to my colleagues here at the college and we think you should get some more credits under your belt from the community college’—and here she fumbles with her papers, finding the name—‘Georgia Perimeter College. The last thing anyone wants to happen is for you to come all the way out here only to be unsuccessful. So let’s get back in touch after a few more semesters, and see where you’re at…’ This continues for a while, and when she hangs up I can hear the relief in her voice. She will not have to deal with me, she assumes, for another year.

  In much the same way as happened at Kakuma, people have been astonished by my difficulty achieving some objectives that they imagine would be easy for me to reach. I have been in the United States five years and I am not much closer to college than I was when I arrived. Through assistance from Phil Mays and the Lost Boys Foundation, I was able to quit my fabric-sample job and study full-time at Georgia Perimeter College, taking the classes I had been told that I would need to apply to a four-year college. But it has not gone as planned. My grades have been inconsistent, and my teachers not always encouraging. Is college really for me? they asked. I did not answer this question. My Foundation money ran out and I had to take this job, at the health club, but I am still determined to attend college. A respected college where I can be a legitimate student. I will not rest until I do.

  This fall it seemed I had finally reached a place where I was ready. I had four solid semesters of community college under my belt and my grades were on the whole fine. They dipped after the death of Bobby Newmyer but I did not think these few mis-steps would hamper my applications. And yet they did. I applied to Jesuit colleges all over the country and their response was confusing and conflicted.

  First I toured. I visited seven colleges and always did my best to take notes, to make sure I knew exactly what it was that they were looking for in a prospective student. Gerald Newton had told me to ask them point-blank, ‘What will it take to make sure I am a student here in the fall?’ I said exactly those words at every school I visited. And they were very encouraging. They were friendly, they seemed to want me. But my applications were rejected by all of these schools, and in some cases the admissions officers did not respond at all.

  When I finally spoke to an admissions officer at one school, a man who agreed to be candid with me, he said some interesting things.

  ‘You just might be too old.’

  I asked him to explain. He represented another liberal arts college with a small undergraduate population. I had visited this school, its manicured topiary, its buildings looking much like the catalog we had passed around while waiting for the plane to take us away from Kakuma.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ he said. ‘There are dorms here. There are young girls, some of them only seventeen years old. You know what I mean?’

  I did not know what he meant.

  ‘Your application says you’re twenty-seven years old,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, picture some white suburban family. They’re spending forty thousand dollars to send their young blond daughter to college, she’s never been away from home, and the first day on campus they see a guy like you roaming the dorms?’

  In his opinion, he had explained everything he needed to. He was trying to give me frank and final advice; he imagined I would quit. But I refuse to believe that this is the end of my pursuit of a college degree, though it seems to me now that I might have to be creative. At Kakuma we could invent a new name for ourselves, a new story for whatever purpose, whenever the pressures and obligations necessitated it.—You have to innovate, Gop said many times, and he meant that there were few unbendable rules at Kakuma. Especially when the alternative was deprivation.

  There is a message on my phone from Daniel Bol, who I have known since Kakuma. He was in the Napata Drama Group, and though he does not say it outright, I know that he needs money again. ‘You know why I’m calling you,’ he says, and exhales dramatically. Normally I would not consider calling him back, but something occurs to me, a way I might solve my problem with Daniel once and for all. I call him back.

  ‘Hello?’ It is him. He is awake. It is 3:13 a.m. where he is. We chat for a few minutes about general things, about his new marriage and his new child, born three months ago. Her name is Hillary.

  Daniel is not a particularly graceful man, and I take some pleasure in hearing how clumsily he arrives at the purpose of his call.

  ‘So…’ he says. Then he is silent. I am supposed to glean from that that he needs my assistance, and now I am expected to be asking him which Western Union is the closest to his home. I decide to have him explain his situation a bit more clearly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh Achak, as you know, I have a new child at home.’

  I remind him that we were just speaking about her moments ago.

  ‘Yes, and she was sick last week, and then I did a dumb thing. I am very ashamed of what I did but it is done. So.

  And again I’m supposed to infer the rest and then wire the money. But I will not make it so easy for him. I put on a bit of theatrics for old time’s sake.

  ‘What is done? What happened? Is your baby still sick?’

  I know that his baby isn’t sick at all, and was not sick, but I am surprised when he drops this part of his gambit.

  ‘No, this isn’t about the baby. She’s fine now. This is about something stupid I did over one weekend. Two weeks ago. You know what I’m talking about.’

  It is always curious how he prefers not to say the word gambling, as if he doesn’t want to pollute our conversation with the word. But I push him one step further and finally he explains what I knew to be the case when I first heard his voice on my answering machine. Daniel leaves his wife and child for days at a time and travels forty-five minutes to the Indian reservation, where there is a casino he favors. There he has lost a total of $11,400 over the last six months. All of us who know him have attempted various methods of helping him, but nothing has worked. For some time, many of us made the mistake of simply giving him money. I gave him $200, all I could manage, and only because he told me that he had no insurance coverage for his child and had to pay the birthing expenses out of pocket. Americans from his church, and Sudanese all over the country sent him money at that time, and only later did we learn that he had been insured all along, and that every cent of the $5300 or so provided to him, from twenty-eight of us, went back to the casino. Since that time, he has been gingerly feeling out those among us who might still be tapped for donations. His approach this morning is to claim a new direction, and salvation.

  ‘This is the end of it for me, Dominic. I’m finally free of this habit.’ He still will not say the words gambling or blackjack. I listen to him for ten
minutes and he refuses to say the words.

  ‘If I can’t pay this off,’ he says, then drifts off for a moment. ‘I just might have to…end it. Just give it up, dammit. Everything.’

  For a moment I don’t understand what he’s saying. An end to the gambling? But then I understand. But I know this threat to be hollow. Daniel is perhaps the last person I know who would ever take his life. He is too vain and too small. We sit with his threat for a few moments, and then I decide that it is time to play the card I have been holding all along.

  ‘Daniel, I wish I could help in your time of need, but I was attacked last night.’ And so I tell him the entire story, the ordeal from the beginning. Though I know him to be a self-centered man, I am nevertheless surprised by how little he seems to care. Along the way, he makes curt sounds that he hears what I’m saying, but he does not ask how I am doing, or where I am now, why I am awake at 5:26 a.m. But it is clear that he knows he cannot continue to ask me for money. He only wants to get off the phone, for he is wasting time with me when he must think of who to call next.

  By many we have been written off as a failed experiment. We were the model Africans. For so long, this was our designation. We were applauded for our industriousness and good manners and, best of all, our devotion to our faith. The churches adored us, and the leaders they bankrolled and controlled coveted us. But now the enthusiasm has dampened. We have exhausted many of our hosts. We are young men, and young men are prone to vice. Among the four thousand are those who have entertained prostitutes, who have lost weeks and months to drugs, many more who have lost their fire to drink, dozens who have become inexpert gamblers, fighters.

  The story that broke everyone’s will was widely told and unfortunately true: One night not long ago, three Sudanese men in Atlanta, all of whom I knew here and in Kakuma, were out carousing. They drank in no-name bars and later in the street, and eventually were awake and intoxicated while the rest of the city had found reasons to sleep. Two of the men began to argue about money; there was $10 at issue, which had been loaned and not repaid. Soon there was a fight between two of them, clumsy and seemingly harmless. The third man tried to break it up but all three of them were sloppy and blurred and one of the men attempted a kick to the chest of his debtor, and lost his balance, landing on his head. That effectively ended the dispute for that night. The three dispersed, and the third man helped the kicker home, where his head swelled. Half a day later, the friend called an ambulance but by then it was too late. The kicking man fell into a coma, and died two days later.