by Bex Brian
“It’s not all like this,” I told her through my tears. “To tell you the truth I think this little game park is for the city kids, so they get a chance to see some of their famous wildlife.”
“It’s not so bad,” she said, leaning over the man on her other side so she could see the receding gates of the park. “Not enough to cry over.”
“What is enough?” I asked.
“Hard to know.”
“How about a dead father?”
“That’s good,” she smiled. “Have you got one?”
“I do.”
“Then here’s my shoulder.”
“I also have a married man waiting for me at the hotel.”
“Perhaps then you’ll need two shoulders,” she said, turning halfway toward me.
“I don’t need shoulders. I need a drink.”
The woman pressed up beside me let out a long sigh. She too seemed to know the meaning of an urgently needed drink. Outside, as the empty landscape began to fill up with flimsy shantytown huts, scores of people appeared along the dusty edges of the road.
“Great walkers the Kenyans are,” I said.
“It’s nice to see,” she said.
“Strange thing about Nairobi,” I said to her, blowing my nose, “is the way it feels. So ad hoc, thrown together, like a tent camp of concrete. That is, of course, until you get to the hotels. Another world, those places.”
“I suppose I should be grateful.”
“You will be.” I nodded. “How long will you stay in the city?”
“Just tonight. And you?”
“Who knows. I was summoned.”
“By which? The memory or the married man?”
“The way things are going the married man will soon be a memory.”
“How nice”—the woman clapped her hands together—“to be in the middle of something.”
The bus slowed and stopped in front of the Norfolk Hotel. I was amazed. “You’re staying here?”
The woman peered through the window. “Is this the Norfolk?”
“It is.”
“Then yes.”
“Wow.”
“I’m rich. And I spend a fortune on these trips of mine. You’re not staying here, I take it.”
“No. But my place is just down the road. And nice too in its own way.”
“I’m so glad. We will both have that drink and take a nap in our respective cloisters.”
“You’re on. Screw Ralph and his plans.”
“Ralph! What a horrible name. I’ll have to change it in my mind as I try to imagine how you two are getting on.”
“My name is Vivienne. Will that have to go too?”
“Vivienne and Ralph. It might work. But not visa versa.”
It took me nearly an hour to make my way to the Belvedere. My bag, its puny wheels no match for the scarred and pitted roadway, twisted and dragged. I felt like I was pulling a fat, recalcitraint animal in its death throes. Why hadn’t Ralph come out to the airport to meet me? Why hadn’t he saved me from having to make my own way down the hill, over the bridge, and into the secret gardens of the Belvedere all by myself?
I was heat-red and beat tired by the time I did. And there, at the entrance of the Belvedere’s resplendent garden, was Ralph, ducking under a cascade of “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” flowers, looking cool as a cucumber. I have never felt so ugly in my life and was aware, even as I did it, of the absurdity of raising my hand to my hair, as if a single pat would help. When his light sweet kiss brushed my cheek, I burst, for the second time that morning, into tears.
We left Nairobi the next day and drifted northward in a Land Rover lent to him by some friend or another, and stayed, even though we brought camping gear, in everything from hunting lodges to cinder-block motels no better than hostels. I could see that the pointlessness of the trip was wearing on him. Often he’d stop the truck abruptly in front of some spectacular view, yanking angrily at the emergency brake before getting out and standing there, watching me watch rather than looking himself. I’d stare hard at the Great Rift Valley below and at the famous lake, filled with flamingos, their multitudes of black-dotted eyes reflecting back my own incomprehension. The problem of looking but not seeing, again.
It was on our fifth day out that he asked me to marry him. We had made it as far as Lodwar. I had wandered into a shop to buy two colas and when I got outside I was stopped by a couple of backpacking Asian girls asking for directions. The three of us stood turning their map this way and that, but it never seemed to look right. Perhaps it was a Japanese map and needed to be read backwards. But before I could be of any help to the girls, Ralph came up and took me by the hand. We went and stood in a patch of shade.
“You know this place, don’t you? You’ve been here many times.”
“Not that many. Six?”
“Does it feel familiar?”
“All of Kenya does. Well, does and it doesn’t. It is different here with you. Or maybe it’s the nature of the trip. You are not a man who can do nothing easily.”
“I’m not doing nothing. I’m trying to find the source.”
“What, of the Nile?” I joked. “You’re way off.”
“No, the source of this familiarity. I’m wondering if it’s you.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Yes. That’s why I think we should get married. Put an end to the speculation.”
“Alright,” I said, brushing off the hordes of flies gathering at the lip of my cola bottle. “If you think that will do the trick.”
“I do.”
“I have not been married before. But it must be alright if you want to attempt it again six days after you left your first wife.”
On the barren desert flats leading out to the lake, we played a game of making up mirages. But somehow none were as weird as the actual sight of a lone Turkana man emerging out of thin air and walking, staff in hand, through the heat haze.
“Nowhere is somewhere in Africa.”
Ralph nodded. Looking at his profile, it occurred to me that the same could be said of him.
“Stop the truck,” I suddenly called out.
Without asking why, Ralph downshifted all the way to first gear, then put the truck into neutral so it could roll to a natural stop. I pulled off my shorts, slid across the seat, and mounted him.
“Don’t move.” I said. “Let’s see if the rumble of the truck is enough.” I felt Ralph lengthen and harden inside me, but the idle wasn’t rough enough.
“Drive.”
I rocked side to side as Ralph depressed first the clutch and then the gas. As we slowly drove, neither of us even bothering to look outside much, the rutted dips and rocky inclines dictated our lovemaking. We meandered across the desert in this fashion until we both had climaxed.
It was much like an afternoon years later when Ralph had been invited to be a guest lecturer on a cruise around the Caribbean. Late one night, out on the open sea, I was allowed by a young first officer to steer the ship. The zigzag wake I created looked the same as our tire tracks through the desert. I told the officer, who had laid his cap on the map table so his bill wouldn’t get in the way of his piercing gaze, the story of Ralph and me screwing in the truck. He took it as a sign that I wanted him to kiss me. I had to wait outside the wheel room until he was relieved of his duty, and by the time he showed up for his kiss the moment had passed. I left him leaning against a bulkhead, worked my way out of a gunmetal passageway, through the lavish-carpeted theme-park atriums, and back to our stateroom. Ralph, sitting in the dark with only the glow of the computer screen illuminating his face, was writing his lecture.
“Let’s see if the movement of the ship is enough to make us come,” I said, worrying at the edges of his concentration. A long minute later he said, “What?”
“The ship. Let’s see if the motion of the sea is enough.”
“I think we’d have to be in the North Atlantic, in winter, in a storm for it to be enough.”
“Can’t we try?”
I thought he was going to say no. Those cruisegoers, Ralph had discovered with a shock, were well informed and, trapped as we were on the boat, he wanted to avoid that terrible tap on the shoulder from some zinc-nosed nerd in a Hawaiian shirt triumphantly pointing out one of Ralph’s errors. Still, he closed his computer and lay back on the bed and let me unbutton his shorts. As I slid his shorts off, caught the musk coming off his stomach, felt at my back the inky blackness and the attendant fear of an endless sea, I was instantly brought back to that trip in Kenya, brought back to Lake Turkana and the strange, formless days we spent there. . . .
“Watch,” I remember whispering to him, my voice barely audible above the pings and the knocks of the truck. We had driven right up to the edge of the lake before cutting the engine. We hadn’t seen a soul since our lone Turkana man walked out of the haze, but now, as I lightly touched Ralph’s leg to get his attention, a band of small boys materialized, and soon after them another truck. By the time the lodge’s boat motored up, our magnet magic had attracted a crowd of about twenty.
But only Ralph and I boarded the launch. We dropped our hands as the boat cleaved the water to feel the liquid pumice that is Lake Turkana, all the while watching our truck—left in the care of the boys, who bloodied one another to sit behind the wheel—disappear from view.
“What else are you going to conjure up?” Ralph asked when there was no land left in sight.
“What would you like?”
“Creature comforts.”
“So, you are a man of material needs,” I said, taking up his hand. His nails were filthy. “I never thought you cared whether the bed was soft, or whether there was a bed at all.”
“I want to see the flip side of life,” he said.
“Then you should have beckoned me to Venice, or Paris.”
“I lacked the imagination. This was the first place I thought of. Plus, I knew what time the plane left.”
The lodge came into view on the far shore, a tiny oasis, perched up there without any other reference on that vast volcanic plain, a place that will trap any thought, any subject, any emotion, hold it until it mutates and becomes a danger.
No one came to greet us as we moored. The boatman left with a shrug, and we had to drag our bags the good quarter of a mile from the shore up to the lodge.
“Could they have put this place on top of the hill for the view?” I asked.
Ralph stopped and, shading his eyes, looked east, west, north, and south. There was nothing.
“Good thinking.”
“I wonder if the proprietor will remember me.”
“When was the last time you were here?” Ralph asked, taking up his bag again.
“When I was fifteen.”
“I doubt it.”
We could see now two waiters impassively looking down at us from the lodge’s empty restaurant.
“Maybe we’ll be the only guests,” I said. “That happened once. My father and I came here so he could recover from a bout of malaria. I’ve never known such boredom. But I do remember that visit as being the first time I became aware of the weird phenomenon of the immediate hours’ seeming to last forever and yet the entirety of the time’s flying by.”
“Was that the last time you were here?” Ralph asked, stopping again, this time to take a breather. We still had a final steep climb up an ancient shoreline.
“No, the time before. We had been in Kenya forever. My father was doing a special. He had trained here just after the war as an RAF pilot. He was revisiting all his former haunts, looking at them from a naturalist’s point of view. He went all out, even examining the social structure of the termites beneath his favorite bar. I loved that show. A rare glimpse into my father’s history. All made up I’m sure.”
“My father too was in the RAF,” Ralph said. “Don’t think he ever got off the island, though. Must have flown in circles.”
“So no grand tales?”
“None. But then he never spoke much.”
“I have one,” I said as we reached the top of the hill and sat down, dangling our legs over the cliff. Three porters were now running in our direction. I was of a mind to make them carry me the rest of the way. “A night flight, training exercise, instruments only. Claims he flew upside down so low over the shores of Lake Nukuru that when he got back to base the tops of his wings were stained green from grass.”
“Impossible.”
“You’d be surprised.”
I stood up, brushed the sand off, and thought, “I’ll never forget this conversation.”
Ralph stood up too. “Where the fuck are we?”
We checked in, then waited by the green opaque postage-size swimming pool while our cabin was being swept out. It was something I had insisted on, telling Ralph when I saw his raised eyebrow that the last time I had been here I found two huge camel spiders lurking under the bed. He shuddered and said, “I hate those fuckers.”
Last cabin. Beyond it was hard undulating earth, a beach at low tide and just as devoid of life as the lodge. Except there was music. Whooping, wailing, trilling, a cappella voices, strong, rhythmic, and until night fell and distant fires appeared—an eerie mystery. We lay naked together on one of the two single beds. It was a test to see if we could move beyond the heat, or perhaps embrace it. “We’ll get so hot that we aren’t hot anymore,” Ralph said.
“Let’s see if we can get so aroused,” I suggested, “that the air feels cold against our bodies.”
The fine line of his collarbone I kissed. This, I told myself, is the body of the man I love. It couldn’t then be merely corporeal, could it? And yet, seeing Ralph lie back, his eyes closed against my touch, I wanted it to be just that. I bit his shoulder, roughly pulled at his hair. I took his lower lip in my mouth, sucking it so hard I felt it swell and tasted the dull salt of blood. But in our cabin hothouse all my actions were absorbed by the engorged downiness of his heat-swollen body. So I gave up, turned soft and yielding. After we made love I let half my body slip off the low bed and knelt with my bum in the air, my chin resting against Ralph’s hipbone.
“I spent half my life as you are now,” Ralph said after a while, stirring me from near sleep. His hipbone’s pressing against my cheek had made me drool.
“How do you mean?”
“Like you are now. It’s the position I would rest in and sometimes fall asleep in after I finished bouncing.”
“What’s that?” I asked, raising my head to look up the length of him. He had one arm thrown across his eyes. He would not look at me.
“It’s rocking. Rocking back and forth on all fours. I spent much of my childhood doing it, most of my teenage years; I even dropped out of school at one point so I could stay home and bounce. Then I ruined my knee and that was that.”
I turned and looked down Ralph’s leg. A long, crooked scar wound around the inside of his right knee.
“I can’t imagine it,” I said.
“Neither can I now.”
“Was it like a fucking thing? Except no woman. You know, like how a dog will hump a pillow. Was it that,” I asked, “or something else?”
Ralph thought a long time before answering. His hand was resting on my shoulder, which he absentmindedly stroked. I had drifted close to sleep again when he spoke. “No, it’s not like fucking. It more like the rocking motion seduces the brain. Your thoughts are exalted. Nothing comes even close to that feeling. Had I not hurt my knee I would not be here. I would not have become a naturalist, or married Mary. I would probably still be in my boyhood room, the radio on, rocking my whole life away. Happily away.”
“You were in a trancelike state?”
“Not a trance. I was in the perfectly enclosed orb of my mind. Nothing will ever come close. It was my universe.”
“What happened after you realized you wouldn’t be able to bounce anymore?”
“I found animals,” Ralph said, his voice sounding very far away.
We fell silent. My cheek
was again resting on Ralph’s hip, through which I could feel his body’s pulse, and to its symphonic beat I could see ringleted, black-shrouded Jews rocking before the Wailing Wall, their words led by or leading their ancient devotions. I could see young Arab boys, prostrate in prayer, unable to resist the throaty call of the Oman, let their bodies fall into a rhythmic sway. And there too before me was a little Congolese girl I once met who, having survived a gorilla charge, found comfort only in sitting in the dark, banging her head slowly, gently, for hours on end against the hatched wall of her hut. I saw the afternoon stillness of a Brazilian village deep in the jungle, the tribespeople all in their hammocks, one leg thrown over the side to propel the gentle rock that kept them in a somnolent state long after the sun had set. I saw countless women, babe to breast, find that perfect metronomic beat to induce their child to sleep. Rocking, I thought—the pulse, the constant, the steady state of life. I couldn’t have been more in love right at that moment. Sleep closed in on me. When I awoke it all had changed, although I was still kneeling and the outside voices were still at it, except that now the rhythm of their song was punctuated and undermined by the shrill out-of-sync blowing of whistles. The voices had infected my sleep and suddenly in all the vastness of that desert, I felt like the sound was cramming itself into my ears, into my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. I stood up and moved toward the door. Ralph’s voice, disembodied in the darkness, stopped me.
“Don’t bother,” he said in a low whisper.
“It’s like Chinese water torture. It can go on for days,” I told him.
“It doesn’t matter. Inside. Outside.”
“I won’t be able to bear it if you feel the same way.”
Ralph didn’t say anything, but I could hear his agitated movements.
“What should we do?” I asked.
“Let’s get drunk,” he said, getting up so quickly from the bed he had to steady himself with a couple of stumbling steps.