Instead Micah committed himself to his brother’s pursuit. He did not know what he expected to find, but if Izzy was out there, Micah pledged himself to his brother’s care. The decision made, the boys kissed good-bye, the bank account emptied, Micah propelled himself forward from train to ship, from ship to plane, from plane to chartered boat, by boat upriver, from cities and hotels to shanties and huts to the desolation of the inner continent, following a bread-crumb trail of memory the whole way, surrendering himself like a man toppling into deepest sleep.
When the brothers were young and magic had first begun to fan its cards across their imagination, they would put on performances in the basement for relatives and friends. The sets, costumes, and props were fashioned from children’s stuff: cardboard boxes and sheets of construction paper, swatches of felt and yarn, cotton balls and Popsicle sticks. But even in the hands of a pair of ten-year-olds, the entertainer’s will to amuse and delight, the need to believe and foster belief in others, the compulsion to transform the quotidian, to offer intimations of a world beyond the visible, was ancient and formidable.
Borrowing his father’s oversize top hat, Micah ran the show, his role as master of ceremonies preordained. It was left to Izzy, then, to play quick-change artist: here impersonating an overgrown, bucktoothed rabbit; there an unsuspecting volunteer lifted from the audience; here a human piggybank from which coins of different size and value were pulled from various orifices; there, in his mother’s dress, a damsel, distressed, squeezed inside a box, awaiting the blade. Even in Izzy’s dream life, Micah appeared as an impresario forever in need of an audience and a subordinate upon whom he could impose his will.
A wandering spectacular that never left home, “Micah and Izzy’s Traveling Medicine Show” always ended with the boys’ favorite sketch. During the “Topsy-Turvy World” portion of the program, the light switch on the familiar was flipped and some comfortable everyday norm was inverted, upturned. In this nonsense world, words and sentences were spoken backward, landscape photos were displayed in negative, pitchers of water were colored green with food dye, egg cartons were opened to reveal a half dozen chirping chicks. In this world of opposites, day became night, past became future, good became bad, black became white, boys became girls.
Most profound for Micah was the dawning precognition that the conjuring of make-believe, the construction of a kingdom of paper and cotton balls, was neither an exaggeration nor inconsistent with the world’s spectrum of reality. Shadow play was no less substantive, magic no less real, for knowing how the trick was performed. Or as Micah explained to Izzy upon introducing him to a ventriloquist’s dummy named Otto, “Just because he’s fake doesn’t mean he isn’t real.”
The Grand brothers’ intuition told them that their children’s play, their first paddles into illusion’s undertow, was of a piece with some ceaseless planetary music. The talking puppet, the rabbit pulled from the hat, the ace of spades peeled from the top of the deck, these silly contrivances were on a continuum with the cosmic. Make-believe, the topsy-turvy, the world of inversion—that was the world. And it was the memory of his first experiences of magic as real as dust that came swimming back to Micah now as he returned to Africa like the fulfillment of a Möbius strip.
The smells reached him first. Odors of putrefaction, of rotten eggs and curdled milk, of fish heads with dried-berry eyes, of dead things given over to decomposition. Then the flies, clouds of them thick and black as smoke, windborne armies of Beelzebub, following them everywhere like a procession preceding a diplomat’s entrance. Only a few months had passed since he was here last, but Micah might well have been an old man returning after many decades to the playground of his youth to find it overrun, smaller than memory had it landscaped, sadder than childhood could accommodate.
Everything about the return seemed off, askew, like a plumber’s level that wouldn’t right itself. In the distance vibrates the stamp-size village, as unmoored from the real as a woodcut illustration from a children’s book: inky, black, elemental, monolithic. Ahead he makes out the presence of some British soldiers, rifles strapped to their backs and pointed upward like radio antennas, as out of place in their red-and-white starched uniforms as crocodiles cruising the Arctic floor.
“Bad things have befallen,” says Mtabi, recently reunited with his employer and similarly weighed down by sadness. “Many bad things since we last made visit.”
“Is Izzy here?” Micah asks the loyal guide, repeating the question he has posed like a prayer countless times since their journey began.
“I do not know, sir.”
What happens to a place when you leave? Does it go on without you or continue in your imagination unabated? What responsibility do you owe it? A few yards ahead of them, a small figure sits silent and still on the parched earth. At first they mistake it for an armadillo or a muskrat. Moving closer, they recognize it to be a child, a boy of perhaps seven or eight, wearing no clothes. He looks on the verge of starving: bones squeezed too close to the skin, the bodily rigging all too apparent, a drawing awaiting a watercolorist to lend it some substantiality. Reaching him, Micah recognizes the boy as Liwiki, one of the most curious and delightful of the village children, whom the company had filmed at play with his friend Souleyman. Recognizing the Westerner, Liwiki struggles to sit up, head and shoulders resting atop a distended midsection the shape of a comic-strip dialogue balloon. He stares unblinking at the group of foreigners. The corners of his mouth are coated in a white crust. Micah kneels down and offers his canteen. He is uncertain whether or not he has license to touch the child, whether or not it would be improper to begin stroking the boy’s head, moving slowly with an open palm from his forehead to the base of his skull, a placating gesture that helps soothe his own boys to sleep when they’re sick. He does, the warm, skin-to-skin contact making the return trip real to him at last.
“So this is Africa?” says a third voice.
“Sometimes,” Micah answers Rose. “Sometimes.”
Bringing Rose had occurred to Micah as a necessity, something preordained rather than a question to be deliberated over. Leaving her for an indeterminate length of time so soon after the miscarriage seemed a terrible cruelty. He feared for her safety back in New York in ways he didn’t worry about Margaret and the boys (the murder of a colored woman in Harlem seeming well within Bumpy’s vocabulary of violence, the slaughter of a Fifth Avenue matron and her two white sons something perhaps not even the gangster would dare). And if the journey led, as Micah suspected it might, to Izzy’s death, that destination was one Micah did not want to face alone. Were he called upon out here to dredge up some reserves of heroism, it would be good to have her watching. Rose’s gaze brought out Micah’s better moral posture.
“I have a husband, remember?” she shot back when he first made the proposal, sitting up in bed in Till’s guesthouse, the old fire returning to her voice.
“Yeah, the man gives a good shave.”
“He likes you.”
“I like him, too. Only man’s ever seen my pecker hard.”
“Only man he’s seen laying down with his wife. Speaking of which, why not ask Margaret?”
“Because I like you better.”
“Really, that’s news to me, mister. Sometimes I wonder how you tell us apart.”
“The difference between a wife and a mistress?” Micah mused, gripping her hand. “A wife is someone you keep secrets from. A mistress is a secret you keep for yourself.”
“That’s the difference, huh?”
“Yes, doll.”
“I say!” exclaims the mustached British officer, picking up his pace as he begins walking alongside the group. His face holds an alarmingly parboiled look, the color of corned beef left too long on a plate. “Mr. Grand! Still drinking from the dregs of the colonial cup?”
“Remind me how I know you,” Micah asks, woozy from the heat and unable to pin a name or context to this unexpected recognition.
“J. P. Keneally, at your servi
ce.” Said with a salute by the British panjandrum from whom Micah and Izzy had gotten their paperwork in the London embassy. “Have you forgotten your friend from Merrie Olde?”
“Yes, of course,” Micah says, recalling his unhappy encounter with the bureaucrat and concluding that all Brits look alike. “My brother, is he here? Is he alive?”
“He’s gone beaming bloody mad, is what he is! Thinks he’s one of the darkies now, running around without any clothes, talking gibberish, says he’s never going back.”
Micah exhales. “Then he’s alive.”
“If you call this living,” Keneally says with expert comic timing. Apart from the stray British soldier pacing back and forth, the village seemed weirdly depopulated, not so much the place he had come to love as its abandoned fossil record. Other than the sick child they’d left in a soldier’s care, they had yet to encounter a single member of the tribe.
“What’s going on in town?” Micah asks, nodding toward the village in the distance.
“Just a spot of mismanagement on the part of the bloody wogs,” Keneally reports. “After their king died, the savages couldn’t be trusted to run a bath, much less a country. So the powers that be put yours truly back in the field.”
“Interesting. This is Mtabi, our guide.” Distractedly introducing his companions. “And this is Rose.”
Keneally licks each pen stroke of mustache. “I say! An honor and a pleasure, Mrs. Grand!”
Micah chooses not to acknowledge Keneally’s mistake. His discomfort is of a piece with the embarrassment he’d felt as a child whenever he’d run into a schoolteacher while with his parents. Only who was responsible for this anguished sense of dislocation? His parents were still his parents. Mtabi was still Mtabi. Rose was still Rose. Of course it was Micah—kaleidoscopic, fragmented, unresolved Micah: Micah the moviemaker, Micah the son, Micah the brother, Micah the husband, Micah the father, Micah the lothario, Micah the child, Micah the man-child—who feared being found out by figures from these disparate contexts. It was Micah who experienced the shame that comes with knowing he would never get his warring personas to reconcile.
“Respectfully, Mr. Grand,” Keneally says as they walk, “I suspect that anything shy of a tranquilizer dart will prove incapable of bringing your brother back to his senses.”
“Take me to him.”
“And that your presence here might go over something like a lead zeppelin. I’ve seen cases like this before, amongst military men whose constitutions consist of, shall we say, stiffer stuff than your brother’s. Going native can be a powerful intoxicant. Pardon me, madam, they simply have to bugger it out of their system.”
“You take me to him now, Keneally.”
“Very well, Mr. Grand, very well. But there’s no mystery where he is.” The officer smiles creepily. “He even rolled out the red carpet for you. Just follow that bloody rag. It’ll take you to your blessed brother.”
TWO
In their haste Micah and Rose had failed to make proper preparations for the return trip to Africa, instead simply taking the valises they’d brought back with them from Los Angeles. It was for that reason Micah now found himself walking down a red carpet dressed in the slashed and bloodstained dinner jacket he’d worn for the Academy Awards ceremony, and Rose trailed beside him in formalwear, barefoot, swollen brown toes lined up in rows like chocolates in a box, a pair of agonizing heels held by their straps, her emotive hair having exploded in the tropical heat like a champagne bottle uncorked.
Micah had never seen Bloat’s red carpet unfurled at its full length before, and it appeared now in all its ugly grandeur, perhaps half a mile outside the village center, a red lane of death opened wide. The earth, vegetation, and thatched huts all around them appeared painted in blacks, whites, and grays, rendering vulgar the carpet’s phosphorescent red—color of blood and battle, of edible berries and wine pressed from black grapes, of the roulette wheel and the billiard ball—the rug’s declamatory brightness a rebuke against the brittle condition of the village. The color of the runner was also weirdly inconsistent, with dappled, stippled blotches and sprays streaked across its threadbare thickness, and here and there the carpet emitted a moist squishiness when they stepped, a fetid tackiness beneath their feet.
“It’s like a movie-theater floor,” Rose says, cautiously taking her next sticky step.
Mtabi removes a candy wrapper from his heel. “What kind of tapestry is this, sir?”
“It’s called a red carpet. They roll it out for special occasions.”
“Such as the commemoration of a good harvest or the anointment of a royal heir?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“And with Providence this grand threadwork might bring us to your brother?”
“That’s what we’re hoping for, yes.”
“I have also met your brother,” Mtabi says, turning to Rose, rolling up his suit sleeve and pressing his forearm against hers. “Early is much darker than you! I believe he truly enjoyed his time here.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Tell me, Miss Letty, what is it like to be of African descent living in the land of Henry Ford and Coca-Cola?”
“What’s it like?” Rose repeats, wondering how to answer the kindly guide. She thought of stories her grandmother had told her of being a sharecropper’s daughter, visions of southern night skies streaked through with comets out of the book of Revelation. Of growing up thinking “nigger” was a word as commonplace as “radio” or “flower” or “hamburger.” Of the first time she had seen her father casually abused in a restaurant outside Philadelphia, the waiter knocking the man’s hat off his head as he passed. She remembered being warned by the neighborhood grocery-store manager not to touch anything on the shelves because her color might rub off and staring in wonder at a carton of brown eggs, amazed that the store would carry what was surely the product of black chickens. She remembered a thousand acts of kindness and cruelty. A world of limits and markers and daily precaution and delight and secret language and singing and rapture, too. A daily existence that once in a while offered flashes of clairvoyance, a sense of privilege in having some clear conception of what America—the place of it rather than the idea of itself—really was. She thought of her grandmother in the kitchen, making red velvet cake for the Fourth of July. “All that white! All that white!” The woman’s face creasing like a newspaper when she said things wicked, mixing cups of sifted flour, sugar, eggs, and buttermilk in a big aluminum bowl. “Needs some dark,” she said, bringing two tablespoons of cocoa into the mix. “Reach inna back the cupboard, honey, and bring me them beets,” she instructed seven-year-old Rose. “Needs some red,” her grandmother said, carefully straining the purple-red vegetable juice and noisily stirring the bowl like a witch brewing a potion. “Needs some blood,” she said, and here the woman held her pointer finger straight out like a staff, pricked it with a clothespin she kept on her apron, squeezed the tip until a drop of the stuff bubbled on the fleshy bulb, and let it drop into the batter. “That’s the love,” she said. “That’s what holds it together. Can’t be the Fourth without some blood!”
“Living in America’s a difficult thing to put into words, Mtabi.”
“Sometimes, like the birds of autumn,” the guide suggests, “one must leave a place in order to see it clearly.”
As they near the entrance of the king’s compound, the carpet becomes covered with small strips of bark. Stubbing her toe on one of the strange pieces of wood, Rose picks it up and recognizes that these aren’t fragments fallen from trees at all but uniformly die-cut chips, each decorated with different striped markings and patterns, single, double, and triple lines etched in quarter-inch bark.
“Look there, sir.” The guide is first to spot it, a giant photograph pinned to the side of a thatched hut, a poster as black and shiny as the back of a scorpion.
Micah hops off the carpet and approaches the image. It is an enormous image of King Mishi sacrificing the bull, the two-f
oot-by-tour-foot one-sheet capturing the beast in midfall, bloody gash in its neck as deep and irrevocable as a first slice of wedding cake. In the bottom third of the movie slick, a credit block touts a picture titled Monsters Need Their Meat as an Imperial Pictures Production and a “Grand Brothers Boondoggle.” In bloodred letters, the words NOW SHOWING! stenciled in a strip across the top.
“Fucking hell, Izzy,” his brother moans.
There are other handmade posters, glistening photographic reproductions adorning the sides of huts and hugging tree trunks, some stretched tight as sails, others waving gently as flags. There is an image of King Mishi nobly looking out over the land (The Trials of Abraham) and the beloved prince standing next to the camera tripod (The Passion of Cri), of Malwiki wrestling matches (Sport of the Ancients) and the peaceful harvesting of dura (Food Co-op), of Spiro in his captain’s costume (Memory of the Fallen) and Till in his pith helmet (Brewing the Pot). There is even an image of the twins themselves, arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, smiling into the sun together like Tom and Huck (Blood Brothers). Each of the billboards is emblazoned with proclamations that announce TONIGHT ONLY! and COMING SOON! and FROM THE STUDIO THAT BROUGHT YOU SCAREDY SPOOKS!
Mtabi shields his gaze from the image of the fallen monarch. “This kind of conjuring is very bad voodoo.”
THREE
They follow the red carpet through the deserted village, past the big gates and through underground tunnels, to the great hall of the king’s chamber. Cast in pearlescent light, at first the space seems occupied only by a camel whose sphinctered lips look like they’re whispering silent thoughts. Staring into the creature’s cello-like face, for a moment Micah allows himself to believe that his brother has metamorphosed into this benign and secretive beast.
O, Africa! Page 30