Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  He knew the feeling. The world was trifling with him, again. When he was little he’d always heard pawn, in chess, as “prawn.” He’d pictured the bolt-blue eyes and pink body of a large shrimp. He didn’t play chess, didn’t know the rules. There he was, a simple “prawn” before forces in the world, which bore no regard for the space of his body. It felt like pulling up to a loading dock under a hard, January rain in, say, Florence, Mississippi, or some such place, some unregulated plant, the dock a stump of slime and garbage. Materials out in the rain, brick mildewed. Shame recognized the it’s-not-about-you reality, the job. This was merely a new kind of work. His first recognition of a job to do appeared in the set of his jaw, all thought collapsed into discrete, repeatable, physical actions, the way the force of a working body springs from assorted triangles of bone, muscle, and tendon. The first thing to do upon the sight of an impossible task or a fearful sight was to face it directly, and imperceptibly nod one’s head at something just behind it. A fence post, a freeway, a dumpster, a twisted pine tree, a person: it didn’t matter what it was, just invisibly nod at a physical object behind the threat presenting itself. This made it appear that you were leaning toward it. And that looked like confidence to the confident, looked like aggression to the aggressive, and remained invisible to everyone else. Shame shook his head, all that could be sorted out later. He went down the stairs of 6329 and out off into the city which had declared itself impossible.

  Shame didn’t recognize the young woman with red-streaked dreadlocks behind the counter at The Act Is Natural. He knew the owners who usually worked at the raised counter and in the office at the back of the store. He’d bought a few dozen games and puzzles over the past year or so. They sold sustainable everything, nothing plastic. The toys were imported from factories in Denmark and Sweden, as well as from women’s collectives in Peru, Costa Rica, the West Bank, and Mozambique. There was a corner shelf upon which sat vehicles made of twisted wire by children in Kibera, Nairobi. Each piece bore a card stating that all revenue went to school fees. He was here to buy four or five of the 3-D wooden puzzles that came in compact, rectangular boxes almost the size of the brick he was not stacking up at that very hour. He paused to picture the job he hadn’t shown up for out near Midway Airport. It was the first day of work he’d ever missed.

  He’d seen the puzzles before, never bought them for whatever reason. In his mind he assumed it was a day off, though he’d never had one. He didn’t allow the anomaly of buying the toys for himself to cross his mind. Near the rear, behind the imported sandals for toddlers and in front of the shelves of books at the back wall, he found the puzzles. He held the solid weight of the different options and selected five puzzles of the same oblong shape: one blue, two red, two in green. On the back of each box was a plain diagram of the abstract shapes a child could configure using the various interlocking bamboo pieces. Statements on the front of the boxes assured the absence of chemical additives and affirmed the renewability of the ingredients and fair-trade labor practices in the crafting of each puzzle. Each had a small white sticker with a price hand-printed in red ink: $17.

  Shame brought the stack of boxes to the front of the store. The clerk looked up from her hardback book, Purple Hibiscus. The fringed tassel of the bookmark glanced across Shame’s wrist and dangled over the edge of the counter made from an old door with a sheet of glass cut to fit its shape. Reluctantly, the clerk put her book aside. On the book’s cover, an alien-antenna-looking stem from a blossom reached toward the chin of a young woman. The top of her face was cropped out of view.

  –Is this it?

  –Yes. I think that’ll do it.

  Staring at the amputation in the photo, Shame forced the response out. The clerk’s eyes brushed over Shame’s hands and he wondered if he could feel the tassel again. Looking up, he felt himself nod invisibly at the woven fabric on the wall behind the clerk’s head.

  –How old are your kids?

  –Um, not mine, I work with kids.

  –Are you a teacher? There’s a discount.

  –No, actually, these are gifts.

  –OK. Fun.

  –Yes.

  –Would you like them gift-wrapped?

  –OK. Perfect. Could you leave them open at the top, I’ll slip in a note.

  –Sure.

  The clerk walked to the back of the store with the puzzles. Shame moved to the front and stared blankly across the street. People passed by. Cars. A bus. Three old men on their way, he guessed, to Valois, a diner a few blocks east. Kids made their way to the bus stop. Everyone was bundled against the cold wind that had sculpted the grit-blackened snow into prototype-looking aerodynamic shapes. An old woman passed by. Shame guessed she was Jewish, but maybe she wasn’t. She wore a fur hat with a matching wrap. The woman pushed a walker with hightech foam grips and a hand brake on one side. A few feet from the store she stopped abruptly, turned the walker toward the storefronts and set a foot brake. Shame watched as the woman made a deliberate series of movements. As she did this, she switched places with her thinly—and very finely, Shame thought—gloved hands like a slow-motion gymnast. She lifted her handbag from a basket in the front, lowered a cushioned panel over the basket, and sat down slowly on the cushion facing the street.

  Shame watched from an angle while the ritualized gestures continued. She removed a small white box from her bag. She then took a thin brown cigarette or possibly a cigar from the packet and placed it back in the bag. After she paused to watch the street, or perhaps to wait for a still moment in the wind, Shame saw a silver lighter appear and soon a white cloud of smoke drifted to the left until the wind caught hold. The previous night with the police alive in his arms and legs, Shame marveled at the scene, the intimacy of deliberate movements, each with an identifiable purpose. Under his breath, Shame heard himself say,

  –Could have fooled me—

  A voice approached from behind, it had begun its address in some inaudible reach of the room. Shame picked up the speech midway:

  –Just tape the end closed. Oh, I’m sorry, did I hear you say something?

  –No, I don’t think so. Look, thanks.

  –You’re most certainly welcome. Come see us again.

  –Sure. Of course. Thanks again.

  Shame heard the bell’s tone waver backward as he pushed the door open into a triangular wedge of snow lodged between itself and the wall to the left. He passed the old woman still sitting on her chair. A very, very tall, thin young black man wearing a black-and-gold Pittsburgh Steelers hat had stopped at her side. He bent down at the knees and waist. Shame’s peripheral vision caught the extreme angles in the young man’s body required by the effort to equalize their heights. Why all the effort? Shame didn’t ask. He didn’t care. As if leaving him out of it, the erector-set collapse of the boy’s body asked Shame’s eyes a question. He stood still and let his eyes answer. The young man’s head didn’t bear the attitude or tilt of a question or the initial sweep of a dialogue. Shame felt his eyes come to the absurd expectation that the two were about to kiss but, no, that wasn’t the angle of the chin.

  As if watching from behind a glass barrier, Shame remeasured the intricacy and nuance of one moment in the world around him; he knew a million moments such as this happened all over the city all the time. There were dozens of invisible pieces in this one moment his eyes had witnessed. Each moment gave way to what it became. This happened beyond the power of any reigning force or will. This was true. He’d just seen it.

  And Shame knew none of it mattered. The world would tickle your chin with an exotic flower, then it would cut your face in half. Events last night had indelibly marked the irreality of all of it for him. It was an irreality he’d known—or that he’d told himself constantly that he knew—and so now he wondered at the stupidity of his surprise. He wondered if it was all an act, natural, to avoid the pain alive and on the loose in his body, his one fragile, temporary body that dangled by strings with its feet an inch above the trap door in the fl
oor of the stage. He suppressed a tingling, violent urge to lash out at the fabrication surrounding him.

  As he turned to walk to the truck he switched the canvas sack full of puzzles to his other arm. A new cloud of smoke appeared in the air. The young man raised back up to more than double the height of the sitting woman’s fur hat. Shame saw a quick swivel of light and her gloved hand dipped back into the brown suede purse on her lap. A barely visible pulse of motion had completed the woman’s act of lighting the boy’s cigarette, which, when Shame looked at it, was thin and brown just like hers. Both acts had been performed right in front of his concentrated attention and he’d hardly seen half of it.

  The trunk of the old Peugeot 505 slammed shut. Shame stood waiting for Francis to unlock his door. The space between him and the edge of the parking lot was full of upside-down funnels of amber light that spilled from the top of tall lampposts. The scene was smudged somehow; it felt like he was wearing old safety goggles. The cold surprised him—maybe in the high forties. Beyond the airport’s perimeter, space dropped off an edge into a blackness Shame hadn’t seen before. He gestured to Francis and pointed out beyond the edge of the parking lot.

  –What’s over there beyond the fence?

  –Over there? Nothing. Bush.

  Francis arrived to where Shame stood, to indicate that the right side of the car was the driver’s side. Shame headed around the nose of the car. The wind was full of diesel scent and charcoal smoke stirred by the invisible tussle and tumult of international money. Something strange in the air felt alive to Shame’s presence and location, maybe even his posture, as if millipedes of sensations tingled and surveyed the surface of his body beneath his shirt and his jeans. The air itself was a body search.

  –OK. Off we go. Your first time in Africa?

  –Yes.

  –Ah ha. It must be very strange, all these black people everywhere, eh?

  –Well, not as strange as all that. But different.

  –Yes, different. Well. I have some things for yo-u.

  Shame had noticed but not remarked that everywhere he’d looked in the airport, almost all the travelers, employees, soldiers, cleaners, porters, were black. But Francis’s comment made Shame conscious that he’d remarked but not noticed how strange it was to be in a space with no black people in it. The back of Shame’s brain was working on that knot so it took him a few seconds to understand what Francis was saying. Like his image of the United States, Francis thought Shame was white, of course. Even that wasn’t all that strange. It was another roll of the same dice. What was strange was the tingling millipedes on Shame’s arms and legs and the countermelody that seemed to pull everything Francis said in two directions. Francis’s words wore their sound the same way his legs pulled at his thin, tight slacks that were about two inches too short for his height.

  –OK. Sarah?

  –Oh. She’s at home. We’ll go to pick her now. There’s a train to Mombasa at midnight.

  –Midnight?

  –Yes. It’s the night train. Arrives in Mombasa in the morning, no telling exactly when, really. But tomorrow, in the morning, probably.

  –I see.

  –Now, first, here’s your phone, full charge should last a few days at least. SIM card, charger, all in the box. Receipt, $70 for the phone itself and $130 for the credit in the phone. And in this envelope is your train ticket, $45. You have Sarah’s number, and mine, and Su’s in Mombasa?

  –Yes, I do.

  –Perfect. You’re all sorted. So-o, you know Kima?

  –Yes, we played music together in Chicago.

  –Aha. Chicago.

  Thumbs up, Francis pointed both index fingers at Shame.

  –Bang, bang.

  –Yeah, pretty much.

  Francis laughed, turned the ignition and the radio came on.

  –Nairobi is the same! Always robbers, from the coast.

  A bassline blasted into the air and covered up the sound of the engine and Francis’s blanket indictment. He turned the volume down and turned his smiling face into an apology. A deep, assured voice dubbed over a chorus of itself sang, Girl, I’ve waited all, all, night for love to find the place … This was Shame’s arrival in Kenya, in Africa.

  –Wow.

  –I know, too loud! Sorry, pole, pole.

  –No, no. It’s just you don’t hear that song much, ever, in the States. Kashif, damn.

  –Really? You know Kashif? Do you know what the name means?

  –Yes. But no, I don’t know what the name means. I never thought about that.

  –Kashif is a name for an explorer, a searcher.

  Shame nodded. The car pulled through a parking lot filled with porters coming and going with massive stacks of luggage. Others lounged on their hand trucks. Now, Shame had to agree with Francis, it was strange to hear this song, once so familiar, then missing for twenty years and forgotten. And then here it was, totally familiar again, in Francis’s car as they drove through the charcoal-smudged amber air past statues of three camels at the exit of the airport and onto a wide, mostly empty boulevard. The buildings seemed similar to those that sprung up around airports, totally commercial and hardly pretending otherwise. The song handed Shame’s memory a clear image of his childhood poster of George Gervin seated on blocks of ice with his thin legs crossed. He wore a sweatsuit. The rim hovered like a silver halo just above his head: ICEMAN.

  Even after two decades, Shame found that he knew every instant of this song: the precise inflections that pointed words in sharp angles; when the keyboard trills and guitar riffs would arrive; the choruses of Kashif that echoed key words in the verses; the other chorus of women, Pretty baby, give it to me baby. A totally forgotten, invisible, and intimate familiarity made for a strange sense of arrival, no question about it. It was as if a forgotten part of his past, almost a part of his own body, had been waiting for him here. He thought about Kima and his love of the music. Shame felt like he’d shown up to Kenya and found it floating in his world when he was sixteen. The unfamiliarity of the surroundings pulled Shame’s eyes in one direction. The intimate closeness of the music pulled the rest of his body in another. All around him were black people who bore no resonance his body recognized. One such person sat beside him. Meanwhile something in the air searched his skin and an inaudible howl in the distance called to him like his own disappeared flesh.

  As Shame watched the scene scroll past Francis’s Peugeot, he noticed space slipping into shapes and vice versa. Between the buildings, an emptiness moved with something visually whistling into or out of it. “What does a visible whistle look like?” he wondered. But it wasn’t visible, nor was it audible. That whistle was spatial, a black vastness. Why did he call it a whistle? It was the same, different blackness he’d noticed beyond the lights at the airport boundary in the parking lot. When he asked, Francis had said it was nothing. Bush.

  When the song ended the whistling vanished from those spaces. “Kashif!” Francis pounded his fist down on the dashboard, smiled at Shame.

  –In this country, that man is loved!

  ■

  Shame slept in the back seat of Francis’s 505. A thin dark-skinned woman with a gold nose ring and very short, red, natural hair woke him.

  –So, Mr. Shame, when we cross this road we’ll roll up our windows. Nairobi has its robbers and thieves. I’m sure you’ve heard. So sorry you’ll go tonight. Kima says you have a very, very urgent need to relax in the most complete fashion. I’ve texted him to say that we’ve received you and now he can relax.

  They crossed some border out of vacant, yawning streets of a downtown-type area pillared with 1970s-style office buildings. Shame heard Sarah say something about Tom Mboya Street and cell phones and watches. Half-awake, he wondered which half of him was asleep. They inched through a crowded market lined with small shanty shops filled with an impossible variety of goods. They passed racks of neon backpacks, tomatoes, CDs and DVDs, kitchen supplies; one store had a welder, one electronics, and one mini storefront
was stacked with old coffee cans filled with charcoal. The items rolled across Shame’s half alertness. It wasn’t the smallness of the shops or the variety of the goods. Those features of the scene blurred on his half attention. What struck him was an absolutely coherent clash between the unthinkable variety of products. Shame felt millipedes of air search his skin. His eyes told him it was random, but everything else he sensed disagreed. Francis said that they were almost to the station as Shame drifted away into sleep again.

  Somewhere underwater a phone rang. Shame couldn’t hear the voice but Sarah’s reassurances made it clear she was talking to Kima. Then she relayed news of an official who’d come to River Road Market a few days ago. She told Kima that the man had ridden in his car speaking from a bullhorn. He’d informed the merchants that they’d “henceforth and hereby” be required to have permits, and shoppers that their purchases would be subject to an official value-added tax. There had been confusion at first. An uproar followed; the official and two escorts were dragged from the vehicle and beaten to death by a group of men armed, apparently, with steel rods and tire irons. As Sarah narrated this to her brother, Shame felt himself veer upward toward the surface of sleep. He kept hearing echoes of Francis proclaiming Kenya’s national love for Kashif. Shame didn’t fully wake up. Some force or weight kept pulling him down, as if by his ankles, away from the surface of his brain.

  Before he actually realized what was happening, Shame found himself hugging Sarah, who had approached him around the car walking with no indication that her feet touched the ground. Francis came around and Shame heard the trunk croak open, then slam. Now awake, or at least maybe awake, Shame stared at Sarah. It was clear to him, now that she was standing still, that she was not in fact in physical contact with the ground. Sarah was afloat. And then as she stood beyond arm’s reach after their embrace, Shame swore there was no space at all between them. The space either wasn’t there or the distance was made of a substance Shame failed to perceive. His feet felt like they’d been permanently installed in the pavement like piles for a foundation. Francis shook Shame’s hand abruptly and rehearsed: