“Look at me, look at me,” Micah says to the African in a private voice that is all patriarchal reassurance, a voice reserved for fireplace seductions and feverish five-year-olds. “Mtabi, quickly, please. Tell him we’re sorry that we frightened him. But it’s important that we make these pictures to show the world. Tell him that, will you, please?”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Castor says, tossing the prop to the ground in disgust as Spiro and Early extinguish the hut with heavy blankets and buckets of earth. “Now you’re a humanitarian, is that it? You incorrigible bastard!”
Ignoring Benny’s words, Micah steers N’golo toward the scriptwriter, forcing the African to face his acting-partner executioner. “Explain to him, will you please, Mtabi, that Castor is his friend, that we’re all friends here. That this is the time of great storytelling.”
There is a long silence during which the man processes this information. Then N’golo’s body answers with a jolt, a shudder that spasms from the crown of his head to the heels of his feet. It is an exorcism that asks the ground to absorb the bad muntu of the preceding moments. When N’golo finally speaks, it is very softly and gently.
“He thinks he understands,” Mtabi translates. “He knows something of the slave routes of many generations ago and believes you to be storytellers of grave importance.”
Micah exhales. “Good, I’m glad he understands what it is we’re trying to do here.”
“But he hopes for your own sake that the cine-camera absorbs some of this bad muntu,” Mtabi adds. “Because he felt this thing. He really felt it.”
Filming goes on all day, past the magic hour, into crimson dusk. Micah and Izzy have storyboarded the action meticulously, dividing the fifty tribespeople into units of fours and fives. As an additional safety precaution, the brothers decide to direct the actors to pantomime at half speed and undercrank the camera, similar to how they’d shoot knockabout stunt work in their comedy pictures. They film the scene from on high, in homage to similarly framed battle scenes from The Birth of a Nation. In the distance, Spiro snakes around Early and Castor, costumed as imperialists, hacking away at natives, striking them again and again and again, the Kabuki slowness of their actions accentuating and making strange the violence. It is something medieval and terrible out of a Hieronymus Bosch triptych or Goya’s Disasters of War series, both visual inspirations that Izzy shared with his brother before filming began. The fields should have been bloodied, the grounds soaked, so sad had the time of storytelling become, so remorseless its verisimilitude.
Micah, ravaged by sleeplessness and sunstroke, held aloft by ambition and adrenaline, is everywhere at once, demonstrating to this costumed native how to strike a blunt machete against another’s leg, illustrating to Castor how to hold a rifle in close-up, using Mtabi as a stand-in to teach two natives how to fall to the ground more poetically, lining up complicated shots for Izzy, hoisting Spiro on his shoulders to frame high-angle compositions of the destruction, thrusting a print of Saturn Devouring His Son into the pop-eyed faces of bewildered children. This is the mad dream realized, seen through Micah’s dark-ringed eyes, pupils the almost-no-blue of fine glass.
Izzy had witnessed versions of this mania in his brother before, the need to size up and overtake any situation—playgrounds, detention halls, street corners, boardrooms, car dealerships—and win, cajole, torque, twist, and bend people to his will. It was these forces—Micah’s animal energy and dynamism and blindness—that bound the company together and mediated the epic strangeness of the endeavor. The king was right to recognize some regal affinity in the man: In Micah’s presence you felt better, safer, the impossible placed within closer reach. But Izzy had never before seen his brother put his talents to such demonic use; this the scabrous, gravelly underside of the charm and ease that allowed Micah to swim through life as frictionless as a seal. After twelve hours of filming—his twin’s hands and face caked in mud, his shirt a gray windshield rag, his hair a nest aflame with grease and sweat—Izzy experienced Micah’s manic energies for the first time as a terrifying, obliterating force and wondered if his brother wasn’t in perpetual flight from some terrible void. Even while marveling at his brother, how Izzy hated his twin for his constant thrashing about, his narcissism and moral slop! How Izzy resented Micah’s tornadic ability to sweep up everyone in his path.
“Is this what we came for?” Micah asks as the crew silently break down the equipment.
“We got some good stuff today,” Izzy understates, taping up the tenth can of film and labeling it with the word “Massacre.”
“No,” Micah says, his voice a sharpened pencil. “Did you get what you want?”
“Better,” Izzy answers.
“Mr. Waldo and Bumpy would be proud. My sister, too,” Early says, circulating a canteen. “From the look of things, the king also approves.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He’s been watching the whole time,” Castor grumbles, nodding to the top of a bluff, perhaps a third of a mile away from the production site, where King Mishi sits on a simple wooden throne, purse-lipped Talli whispering admonishments into the royal ear. It is too far off for Micah to read the king’s expression, but in that moment he feels himself the monarch’s intimate, two practitioners on equal terms with forces of magic and the collective psyche.
Micah points to Mtabi. “Promise the king that we’ll return to show them the film when it’s done.”
“You’re going balmy, man!” Castor exhales, hands on his hips, kicking at the dirt.
Micah stares across the expanse at the king’s ill-tempered adviser. “Say it in their language so everyone understands.”
And as the translated words are delivered by Mtabi, the first pitterpatter of rain, soft as elves’ feet, wings its way down from the heavens. The drops strike thatched huts, bounce off crosshatched greenery, and are swallowed by gulping brown earth. The group looks up in unison as the swirling sky darkens at once, like melted chocolate added to cake batter, and a blue bolt of lightning—the first the Malwiki have seen in six months or more—traces a broken spine across the sky. There is a rumbling overture of thunder, followed by a conductor silencing the orchestra. Then rain begins to fall in earnest. It comes in bursts of Christmas tinsel and tossed blue blankets, waterfalls and rivers of the stuff, dams broken and bathtubs overturned from above, accompanied by slaps of contact louder than planks of timber felled in the forest. It comes in pails and buckets, pouring and sluicing around corners and bends, a pronouncement delivered right out of the heart of the firmament. Exhausted from their long day filming, at first the Malwiki think this is just another conjurer’s trick, another Hollywood effect, placidly accepting it as yet another manifestation of the magic that has enveloped them since the Westerners’ arrival. Then, slowly, registering this as the real, the actual, the thing itself, nature’s long-awaited judgment on the worthiness of all their ways, the Malwiki throw off their false shackles and begin singing in the rain.
“See, what’d I tell ya!” Micah booms, bursting, unannounced, into the king’s private sanctum, trailing a fluttering parade of dignitaries and outraged wives. “I knew we’d do some good around here!”
Outside the king’s quarters, the sound of raindrops continues tap-dancing on dry earth. Pots and pans of clay, metal, and glass have been left outside huts to gather rainwater, and even from the cool interior of the king’s underground chamber one can register water’s entire sonic range, its splashdowns in all keys.
“What does Hiding Feather have to say about this development?” the startled monarch asks Izzy, a devoted pupil who, in just days, has earned advanced degrees on the subjects of love digital, oral, and anal.
“I’m not certain the old rules of cause and effect still apply, Your Highness,” Izzy replies, beaming. “But I’m glad it’s raining!”
“Indeed.”
The director steps forward. “Your Majesty, on this auspicious occasion might I put in a special request?”
Micah
asks permission to shoot a lion. Not slay one but photograph one, venturing deep into the veldt to capture the big game in its native habitat.
“Let’s leave photographing the birds and zebras to my kid brother,” the director says. “I’m the captain of this company. It’s only right for me to go up against the big cats.”
“No, this will not do!” says Talli, the counselor betraying to the group his fluency in English. Outraged by the impudence of this request—the king serving as lowly guide for decadent Westerners!—Talli quickly catches his mistake and reverts back to his native tongue. The counselor’s high-pitched protestations are accompanied by a flurry of gestures, winged bats flapping from the end of either arm, but King Mishi lifts a silent hand against his adviser.
King Mishi raises in salute to the filmmakers a chalice filled with cool rainwater. He drinks. “We will plot this expedition as you wish. But with the understanding that the lion, the rhinoceros, the mastodon of the fields, these creatures you so admire, might not respect this as your time of storytelling.”
“It’ll be dangerous, is what you’re saying?”
“Oh, yes.” The king smiles.
“We brought the rain, Your Highness. What’s a little kitten to a couple of fellas like us?”
TEN
Sleep came difficult to Micah here. When it did arrive, the second hand on Micah’s wristwatch prompted a recurring dream. He is standing in a large ranch-style house, and an announcement is made that he has just five or ten minutes left to live, which sets him running through the place. As he runs from room to room—a succession of rooms like you’d find in the compartments of an overnight train or an ocean liner—there is the persistent sound of ticking clocks, and the announcer’s voice provides updates: “You have five minutes left to live,” “You have two minutes left to live,” et cetera. And each room is occupied by different people from Micah’s life: his parents, Izzy, school pals, professional associates, Margaret, his sons at various ages. And in the final room, sitting alone on a bed wearing her pair of satin gloves, is Rose.
To Izzy everything was waking dream. Once love had visited him, Izzy made no attempt to deny it. He walked around shirtless, with peeling shoulders, shirttails wrapped around his waist like a skirt, and a feather—a gift from Cri, the boy with a whisper for a name—fastened behind one ear. In the evenings Izzy had taken to bringing the prince back to the brothers’ shared sleeping quarters, where they held each other like pliable pieces of cooling candle wax. If they didn’t dare engage in congress in Micah’s sleeping presence, still Izzy’s brother would sometimes wake in the night, thinking of Rose and be comforted by the sight of his brother cradled spoonwise.
Izzy had wings, wings of his making and his choice. The former limitations and self-doubts were revealed as sand-castle monuments, imposing-looking but insubstantial edifices that could be knocked down with the slightest prodding. It went without saying that Izzy was the vessel (Cri was a prince, after all!), and if his first time was indeed painful, he felt a kind of flowering in himself as it went on, sensations that coupled pain and pleasure and itching and scratching and tightening and expansiveness and rippling and calm and pain and then no pain. He was on his knees, then on his side, then on his back, in a cool field at night. Cri was gentle but showed a determination in sex, too, that he kept hidden from daily view (a purposefulness that would serve him well, Izzy thought, in his future role as king). If the boy could have entered Izzy and pushed through him—subsuming him and passing to the other side—the cameraman felt he would have.
A catalog of sensations new to Izzy: the warm, inviting pliability of skin; the pleasant tacky quality of sweat and saliva and semen; the bristling of little hairs where Izzy didn’t know he had any (at the base of his back, the rims of his earlobes, the fantastically sensitive stretch between his scrotum and anus). There were the improvisatory demands of the act, its shifting, problem-solution dynamics; a dissolving of self-consciousness accompanied by a heightening of the senses. There was the miracle of a beating heart, another human clock ticking away under his. There was the preposterousness of his cavity sealed like a ring over the boy, honest enough for a wedding vow. There was the senseless repetition of the procedure—pull it out, try again; pull it out, try again; pull it out, try again—a facsimile in miniature of a lifetime’s trial and error. There was the rising, the falling, the grappling. There was the way the act dramatized its attempt to get at the bottom of itself. (If you intellectualized it, if you described the mechanics of it, if you tried frontal-lobing it, it made no sense at all.) There was the fragility, too, of grasping another’s corporeal shell, an awakening awareness of the body as bone and gristle and muscle, a vulnerable container carrying a collection of spuming, gurgling organs. Tracing the delicate line of Cri’s collarbone and the hollow it formed against his chest, Izzy appreciated just how fragile a body is and how sex is, among other things, an act of bravery, a test of resolve.
His parents visited him during the act, the first time their ghosts had appeared to him in years. They were there with him that first night Cri entered him, were with him as he wrapped the boy’s arms around his shoulders, were with him as he nuzzled in the prince’s armpit and inhaled his musk, were with him still as he greedily sucked on Cri’s fingers. Did they know? For all their boundless love, had they been aware how much pain he had been in? Did they know him at all, these strangers who’d birthed and raised him? Was it sickening or happy-making for them to see him entwined in contortions like these?
“Hi there, Bean,” his mother said as if she’d seen him just yesterday, calling Izzy by his childhood nickname still, the pretty lady in a dress he remembered from boyhood instead of the ravaged, cancer-stricken skeleton from the end. “I’m glad you’re finally learning how to wrestle. I always did wish we’d been more encouraging about you taking up sports.” There was no fooling his father, who watched the coupling poker-faced. A flicker of bodily disgust twitched across his mustache as the two men continued grappling—this from a man who had sawed open cadavers.
For Izzy, even out here in the jungle, being buggered by a black boy, his parents dead over a decade, how important their approval was to him! How important still, to be thought of as a good boy! Could his parents understand the necessity of the project, the entire apparatus of this stripping-away? Had they wished that their own lives had been bifurcated by some similar jolt, a severing from the systematized demands of household chores and office work, child rearing and holiday making—the thin chain of events called life that could, so easily, through accidents of history, have been replaced by other, equally valid catalogs of memories, irreplaceable loved ones capable of having been played by other, equally essential casts of characters? A comforting and terrifying prospect: the thought of his parents as other than his parents, a life lived without his world.
When it was over and the spirits had retreated, with broken language and hand gestures Izzy tried explaining to Cri how he’d been visited by his mother and father. The prince was unfazed. The Malwiki believed with little fuss in a spirit world, one that required neither palm reader nor séance but that spun all around them, a cocooning continuum of community and feeling that extended across the divide between living and dead.
“It must have been good to see them,” Cri offered, responding to the news as if Izzy had mentioned running into a neighbor down the block. “Were they happy to find you here?”
“Yes,” Izzy answered, sprouting another beanstalk, “they were.”
“A toast to my sister’s wedding,” says Early, raising a mason jar to the union of his sister and the fifty-three-year-old barber who lived up the street. Izzy is off somewhere with Cri, and Till is still laid up in the village infirmary, so on this night before leaving for safari, it is Micah, Mtabi, Early, Castor, Spiro, and the midget’s contingent of four teenage handmaidens lying around a campfire under a bluff, covered in thick woolen blankets, passing around bottles and sitting out the rain, protected by the landscape’s o
verhang.
“He’s no oil painting,” Early reports of his new brother-in-law, who at that moment was standing knee-deep in hot towels and hair clippings half a world away, “but he’s a good man.”
“And Rose?” Micah asks, accepting a cloudy bottle of rye from Castor. “How does she feel about him?”
“Rose plays those things close to the vest.” Early smiling, stumbling backward, and landing on his rump. “But he can take care of her.”
“Well, your sister’s a big girl,” Micah says. “That’s one of the things I admire about her.”
Castor retrieves from a satchel a flask of brown bourbon. “To paraphrase the words of our friend Oscar Wilde, the first glass makes you see things as you wish they were. The second makes you see things as they are not. And the third makes you see things as they really are, and that’s the most horrible thing in the world.”
“Fair enough,” Micah says, draining his third shot. He waits for the alcohol to do its work, for the binding of the pages of his personality to loosen. Rose. It is worse that he should receive news of her wedding out here, in her imagined homeland of antelope and sunshine and yams, out in the unmediated world. She was very much with him these days. Each time he passed something beautiful or odd or uncanny he’d note it for her, thinking how he would like for her to have seen it and how he might describe it to her upon his return, congratulating himself, really, for how deeply she might appreciate his own appreciation of things. Rose. If he were honest with himself, he’d never liked a woman more, never felt more himself around a girl, the two of them tuning forks humming at similar frequencies. He pressed his mind to deliver a metaphor that would strike at the heart of her appeal. She was the cool side of the pillow. The sugary milk left at the bottom of the cereal bowl. A perfect piece of blue sea glass found on a beach. She was gone, is what she was. He was out here in a delirium, and Rose was off getting respectably married to some black dude in Harlem, and Mishi had ten wives and Spiro had a harem and even his brother was off getting laid and Micah hadn’t once turned to stone since their arrival. He wanted all things in all ways, he didn’t want to give anything up, and he never pitied himself more than when surrounded by other people’s happiness. He passes the bottle.
O, Africa! Page 19