“But nothing doing—better to shoot them running.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, hold this.” Early hands Izzy the camera, withdraws from his dungarees a tangle of red, white, and blue wicks, strikes a match off his heel, then lights the sizzling mess of firecrackers and sends it hurtling into the air.
SIX
The crew hadn’t seen their host since they commenced filming the week before and worried that they’d fallen out of favor with King Mishi. Then, on the afternoon of the seventh day, Talli, the court’s chief counselor, visited the set of Pot of Trouble. Just as Till emerged dripping from a giant cauldron, Talli leaned in to whisper words to Mtabi, his mouth drawing a distinct line of disapproval, suspicious eyes gathering all light toward him, and doleful, fantastically long earlobes lengthening as he imparted his message.
“There will be a great feast in the village center tonight,” Mtabi relayed after the counselor departed. “The king requests the honor of your attendance and in particular asks that you bring the cine-photo camera.”
Spiro makes his entrance first, carried in on high, Cleopatra style, in a heavily decorated chair held aloft on poles; with his iron-filing stare and his arms folded regally across his chest, the wrestling champion appearing the realization of his dream self. Talli follows next, taking his ceremonial place beside the empty throne, features as fixed as the leading in stained glass. Then perhaps twenty of the king’s children assemble, ranging in age from babies just a few months old carried by wet nurses to strong young warriors in their early teens. The king’s wives arrive next, including a few older women the company has not yet encountered who wear large metal and wooden disks in their lips and ears. The plates stretch and distend the women’s skin, in some cases pulling their lips several inches away from their faces so they jut straight out like opened cash-register drawers or tugging their earlobes into giant hollow loops that swing as freely as bird perches. When the women take their seats next to Castor and Spiro, the men turn away from this monstrous distortion of feminine beauty.
“Every time I feel close to understanding them …,” says Spiro, who since their arrival has himself taken a pirate’s piercing.
“Signs of great beauty,” says Mtabi.
“Strange idea of beauty, that,” Castor grumbles.
“Not meant for decoration originally,” Mtabi explains. “Intended to make the women ugly, so Arab traders wouldn’t sell them on the coast. Meaning changes over time.”
With this explanation serving as overture, the women join in a circle and begin chanting and stomping, hopping on coal-red feet to a variety of skin drums and fossilized percussion instruments. They work themselves into a near-orgiastic fervor in their effort to conjure the man of the hour, who finally appears in the distance.
King Mishi is covered in ceremonial robes and headdress, as if recently returned from lands beyond the sun after communing with his forebears. First acknowledging the faraway crowd with the smallest bow, the king then enters an animal pen near his compound that houses the royal family’s private livestock and appears moments later coaxing forth a mighty bull. Izzy is filming it all, opening the aperture wide to accommodate the fading blue light of the magic hour. Zooming in with the telephoto lens as the king begins the long walk to the campgrounds, Izzy sees that the king is wearing a lion’s mane on his head—the two sets of eyes stacked close together as unsettling as watching a person open his mouth while doing a headstand.
“What’s with the tiara?” Micah asks Mtabi.
“Only a hunter who has killed a lion with a spear, without assistance from others, may wear the lion’s mane.”
The king ushers the ox into the center of the convocation, stroking the animal’s sides while coaxing him into position. The animal’s hooves are like large cracked stones, and his smell is a mixture of dung and clay and honey. The bull is massive, with a bristling, thick coat and heaps of musculature piled atop an undergirding of sinew and bone, as gloriously well proportioned as the hills and valley of a great river landscape. The assembly quiets, and at this closeness it becomes conversant with the animal’s breath, synchronizing itself to the calming rhythm of the bull’s intakes and snorting, dust-filled exhalations. In the firelight all are captivated by the forces of muntu emanating from both beast and master, who clearly loves him.
The king slits the animal’s throat. It occurs suddenly and without warning, the act performed as indifferently as a bank teller opening an envelope: A blade issues forth, a line is drawn, and a spray of arterial blood spasms from the animal’s neck. So quickly does it happen, so casually is the murderous rite performed, that the congregants have no time to register shock. The beast falls on its front legs, and the king continues stroking its mane, comforting the dying animal as its black eyes begin to cloud milkily, its breathing slows, and its hind legs finally shudder and collapse.
Long knives are brought out. Spearmen rise from the group and jab at the carcass here and there, thick red and black blood matting the fantastic brown coat, seeping through the fur like wine rising through cheesecloth, the animal now covered in large punctures. From its curled lips issues forth a frothy white substance that distends distressingly like elastic and reaches the ground, where it gathers and soaks into the parched earth. The king’s forearms and hands are now coated in blood and mammalian thickness, exhaustion mapped on his face, something of the bull’s passivity and force wedged into his expression. He turns to face Izzy, who has been preserving it all, the sacrifice and its aftermath, with the magic instrument.
“Now he has achieved immortality.”
“Yes,” says Izzy with bile-scalded breath. “We’ll make sure of it.”
The tribesmen, wives, and children all look expectantly toward the sky as the bull’s muntu expires and is absorbed into the ground, the universe left a fraction of a degree duller following this departing essence. But the vault does nothing to acknowledge this gift, offers nothing in return except boundless blue with stripes of white clouds that look like fat streaked through bacon.
“The bull is the mightiest animal of the Malwiki,” Mtabi leans in and whispers. “This ritual sacrifice made to appease the rain king is very much a last resort.”
Micah holds a hand to his mouth as the tribesmen complete the butchering of the carcass, but it is more out of empathy with the king than horror over the fate of the slayed bull. Though his wives continue chanting and stamping and wailing—the youngest rending their hair and clothes, some of them bathing in warm animal blood—the king begins to mark his retreat, making his long march home. In the distance, diminishing, viewed from behind, he might have doubled for one of the sad Jewish salesmen that Micah, as a boy, watched from his window each morning, leaving their homes with heavy suitcases.
SEVEN
As the crew grew more familiar with village ways and began taking their meals together with the tribe, Cri, the king’s favorite son, became known to the company as the friendliest, most ubiquitous of the Malwiki. His very appearance around camp was an event as happy-making as the summertime sounds of an ice-cream truck jingling down the street, a kite taking the wind, or the opening of a city hydrant on a hot day. “Did you see the prince today?” “Do you know what the prince did?” “Did you hear what the prince said?” were the constant refrains of the village chorus.
The prince had limbs that bent as easily as blown glass, tapered fingers as long as candles, and a forehead that curved like an incandescent bulb. He also was in the habit of touching whomever he encountered. He would eat food with both hands and offer the beslobbered, slime-covered digits for others to lick, pass a pipe while gripping one’s thigh, ask a question of you while cupping the back of your neck and fixing his stare upon you like a wax seal. All of these actions he handled with great affection, all accomplished with immense, unblinking, wide-spaced eyes. Izzy, who could not tell whether he was one of Cri’s true favorites or a mere recipient of the prince’s promiscuous sociability, found these tendencies of touch
both heavenly and disconcerting.
The prince had fixed upon the cameraman from the start as a focal point among the production company’s members and made it his ambassadorial mission to acclimate Izzy to his new surroundings. With Cri leading him through the village square by the hand, Izzy resembled a transfer student being shown around the high-school cafeteria by the varsity football captain. While the cameraman’s native unease and reticence kept the flag of his social skepticism flying high, after a few days of this attention Izzy’s wariness began to subside.
In Izzy’s imagination the features of the landscape were inseparable from the contours of Cri’s hand. There were muscular hills and dry dorsal plains, thin vegetation streaking out across flat fields and rocky formations marking the outskirts of the territory. By way of these hand-holding expeditions, Izzy had in those first few days touched Cri more than he had any other human being since childhood. If their contact were to be limited to that, the cameraman told himself, it would be enough to sustain him for years.
Instead Cri helped Izzy out of his suit. Surprised to see the cameraman dressed so formally after his first days in the village, Cri fingered with incredulity the scratchy, hot material, which gathered the sun’s rays and splintered in the heat like rope. It was with a forgiving laugh that the prince forced Izzy to shrug free from this cocoon, pulling the cameraman’s arms out of their casings like shucking stalks of corn from their skins, attacking the buttons of Izzy’s oxford shirt, working each tiny tortoiseshell disk through its slot, then rolling up Izzy’s thick sleeves and wool trouser cuffs to expose skin that was white, supple, and unblemished. As simple as that.
“Why does he keep touching me?” Izzy asks Micah one night after they’ve retired to their hut, its curved, sloping walls mocking the brothers’ rectilinear luggage, equipment crates, and thought processes.
“It’s just their way, Itz.”
“Yes, okay, fine, I know that, but what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Do whatever the hell you want,” Micah responds with impatience. “Do you even know? Do I need to diagram it for you, Itz?”
Micah had known for a long time that Izzy was a twist, a sexual proclivity that didn’t particularly bother Izzy’s brother, who had encountered his share of industry fruits. To Micah, anything that expanded upon the body’s catalog of desire—any variation on that comically limited repertoire of expression—was good news to him, good news for the humanity business. He was almost certain, however, that Izzy had never acted upon these urges. It pained Micah to think of his brother dooming himself to live a life without touch. Especially given Micah’s belief that sex was one of the truest portals of discovery a person had available to himself, the surest passport to locating other people’s secret selves. Micah had tried talking with Izzy about all this on a few occasions, usually around holiday time or when they were invited to some industry function that Izzy would invariably attend unaccompanied. When prodded on the subject, however, Izzy was as fragile as an Easter egg: press too hard and he might permanently crack.
There were ways to live like that, a life could be made for oneself—Micah knew a pair of puffs who lived together as bachelors in Hollywood—but his brother lacked that kind of bravery and brazenness. Dutiful, serious, self-abnegating Izzy! What was most troubling for Micah was how he couldn’t tell whether his brother’s grim and purposeful hollowing-out was a way of masking his secret or an expression of the very core of his person. Izzy was an orderly guy—someone most at home in a mechanical world of machines and darkrooms and chemical baths. And sex was madness. Sex with women, sex with men, too much sex, not enough sex. The whole thing was an unruly disaster, the great swamp from which we spring and spend our lives looking for a clean patch of water, a happy spray of sunshine.
If Micah puzzled over his brother more than another sibling might, it was because they were twins. As King Mishi had suggested, Micah believed that Izzy was in possession of missing pieces of himself—that the payload of spiritual and temperamental gifts had been divided evenly between them in the womb—and so he chose to interpret his brother’s fate as an inversion of his own. It was for this reason that Micah felt a special sense of responsibility for Izzy’s sadness and sobriety and took his own excesses and profligacy to be a necessary counterweight to his brother’s temperance. In fact, Micah nicknamed the worst of his alcohol-induced shakes and tremors “the Izzies.” Confronting his achy, blue-lipped self in the cold-tiled bathroom some hungover Thursday, unable to meet his own bloodshot gaze in the mirror, he’d often find himself saying, “For you, Izzy! I did this for you!”
If the opportunity for experience presented itself to Izzy—especially out here, where no one could see—Micah wished his brother would take it. At times Micah even found himself envying what homosexuality might be like, an entirely alternate system of values and secrecy. In his imagination it seemed like a higher form of male bonding, a realm separate from love, from institutional pressure, from emotional bargaining or dubious promises of fidelity, marriage, children, stability, responsibility. Rather, this would be an altogether other world of men, applying male ruthlessness and efficiency to the arena of physical contact and release. What could be better? (Indeed, there was something masculine and matter-of-fact about Rose’s approach to things carnal that he admired very much.) No, it was never his brother’s inclination that Micah found untenable. Micah could forgive Izzy’s faggotry, but his unhappiness was inexcusable.
Izzy had been found. A shoulder squeezed in passing would keep him cradled in warmth all night, some popping cluck-cluck words delivered in his direction would send a smile sailing across his face, an afterdinner tousling of Semitic curls would bring on sharp summer storms of happiness. The beautiful boy seemed to experience the world through his fingertips. Such facility with touch, such an infant logic to it! And why shouldn’t you touch everything and eat everything and see everything? Izzy thought, rising from his mud hut into a van Gogh night of swirls and whorls, blue moonlight printing everywhere negative images of trees, leaves, huts, and stones. Pretzeling himself on the parched ground, belly covered in ooze, Izzy was left to wonder if the prince was thinking of him at that moment, too.
On the ninth day, Izzy comes upon Cri bathing. Though the nominal reason for the expedition is for the cameraman to relocate the steamer trunk full of exposed film closer to the bathing pond and its surrounding cool clay earth, Izzy is familiar with the villagers’ schedule and knows when and where the king’s son washes.
The prince is kneeling on some stones before a reflecting pool, washing himself without soap, when Izzy arrives. The drought has robbed the bathing pond of most of its water, and the boy stands in its center naked, liquid ringing his ankles like a pair of dirty socks. The water level is low, and what remains of the stuff is coated in a scummy film, similar to the lathery residue lining a sink after a shave. The pond walls, though, are rich in mineral deposits, and each time the prince scoops up handfuls of dark substance to pour over himself, traces of glittery particles streak across his skin, like glass-flecked city pavement reflecting light.
Izzy has seen Renaissance paintings of similar tableaux: mythic scenes of flawed human specimens stumbling across perfect bathing deities, and he wonders if he will be transformed into a fawn or a tree for this transgression. Instead, spotting him in the near distance, Cri waves happily to Izzy, motioning for him to come closer. Izzy does not move. The prince gestures for Izzy to remove his striped cotton pajamas and join him for a wash. Izzy looks around, then unbuttons his top and casts it aside. Cri cocks his head impatiently, and Izzy quickly removes his trousers and then the rest of his garments, standing for the first time unclothed before another man.
Naked and white, Izzy feels like a boy; only the hair covering his legs and belly and chest is not childlike. Cri frowns. He then wades over to where Izzy is standing, rising from the pool wet and gleaming, covered in gold dust like an amphibious god. Without preamble, he takes Izzy’s penis in his hand a
nd goes into a careful study of it, curious about the organ’s lack of foreskin. The prince pinches the head between forefinger and thumb like a Boy Scout testing the resilience of a campfire marshmallow and begins running his thumb back and forth over the ridge like a lighter that’s difficult to strike.
“In my religion …,” Izzy begins, his explanation trailing off as the biblical organ of patrimony grows bigger and he leans, quaking, into the princeling, both arms collapsed around Cri’s shoulders for support as the boy continues tugging at the organ’s length, pulling Izzy’s penis, gripping it in his fist, stroking it up and down, tugging him this way and that, until Izzy’s first hand job is complete.
EIGHT
In New York Izzy had often wondered, What is happiness? A good meal? A successful picture? The physical pleasure of zigzagging through busy midtown streets? Feelings of goodwill toward others? (It always amazed Izzy how Micah could be so phenomenal a shit, such a callous betrayer of people and principles, and still appear in the pink of self-content.) Happiness now revealed itself to Izzy not as a thing but a place, something topographical in nature, a physical distance that could be surveyed and brokered. The familiar hues of misery had for so long been a comfort to him, grays and blues and blacks soothing in their very unchanging coolness. Not so the brilliant and balmy humidity of happiness—climates temperate and temperamental that could explode into epiphanies of sunshine or thunderstorm erasures.
The old world had the texture of history to him now, a yellowing photo robbed of currency and significance. Cars, streets, newspapers, many-storied buildings, the mass desiring of the entire ambition-drunk metropolis—all seemed to belong to some imagined past already receding behind him. He felt as if awakened from deepest sleep, a revenant revived to find the world not rocketing toward some crystal future but cast back to some simpler past, one pared down to body and earth and communal bond. If he could strip himself of everything known, all the assumed premises—how to button a shirt, fold a newspaper, hail a cab, make a bed, scramble an egg, settle a bill—he would. Physical sensation had become all. Everything had become color. Language replaced by dialogues carried on among cadmium, canary, cerulean, crimson. Green had its own vocabulary, earth and mustard their own lexicon.
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