“Any sign of him?” Rose asks.
“No, not yet,” Micah says, eyes adjusting to the dark as he moves toward the far end of the hall by the vacant wooden throne to throw open the shutters, “but he could be anywhere.”
The room holds a musty, clotted scent, a smell reminiscent of empty mason jars or old slippers pulled out from under the bed. Gray shafts of light illuminate large, unhealthy-looking motes that squiggle around the space like it’s a petri dish. Absent the animating force of King Mishi, the hall is revealed a dank and gloomy affair.
Were Izzy not lying in the opposite corner wound in a filthy bedsheet, were he wearing clothes, were his scalp not shorn, were his figure not emaciated—with stalk-thin arms and an exposed rib cage—if he looked less like a broken puppet, it would have been easier for Micah to distinguish his brother from the surroundings. Izzy, warped, diseased, a sliver of personhood, connected to selfdom by mere filaments, but still, irrevocably, Izzy.
“Argh, Micah, I really don’t want to talk about it,” says the sheet-tangled figure in a voice indistinguishable from the one Micah knew as a teenager, when Izzy improbably stumbled ahead of him into puberty.
“Good Christ! Rose, get some water.”
“Yes, Rose, get this man some water!” Izzy says, hurling a chamber pot at his brother, a spray of waste and a clang of copper halting Micah’s advance.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Rose says as a rivulet of drool winds its way toward her bare feet.
“Why do people love the smell of their own shit?” the phantom figure asks, folding back into the gloom. “But not the smell of others’?” Izzy has learned to love defecating out here, outdoors, squatting away anywhere, leaving excremental traces of himself everywhere, wiping himself with handfuls of mulch, sometimes choosing not to wipe at all. It was all shit. The world was a giant factory of entropy, waste, decay. And we experience that not-so-secret truth as individuals every day. Couldn’t they see that?
Micah’s eyes now fully adjusted to the theater of blackness, he begins to make out additional details: empty cans of film—shiny doubloons, silver dollars, dozens of them—stacked in a far corner of the room; a primitive-looking wooden table his brother must be using as a kind of workbench; drained cans of condensed milk, baked beans, rotting fruit rinds, and empty medicine bottles. There were startling details of Izzy’s person to discover, too: clumps of hair indiscriminately deracinated across the bloodied scalp; his face covered in pitch or ash, black as Jolson’s; and, stranger still, twining across the torso, too many to count, a map of bruises or scratches, patterned strings of them, small, black, almost indiscernible, wending across his back, wrapped around his neck and wrist and shins. Eventually these shapes sharpen out of the fog, revealing themselves to be neither cuts nor contusions but the most familiar figures of all: 4, 3, 9, 1, 2, the Arabic numerals string themselves together in random-seeming combinations, marking themselves across Izzy’s bruised and injured body.
“Why did you come here, Micah?”
“To find you. To make sure you’re okay.”
“Everything you’ve ever done is for you. What’d you really come here for?”
“To bring you home, Itz. To bring you back with the film.”
“Oh, the film! The film! Always an ulterior motive with this one,” he says, wagging a finger at Rose. “You’ll get your picture, Micah. I’ve been working on it out here, back at the scene of the crime. Is that my friend Mtabi?”
“Yes, sir,” says the translator, whose immanent calm in the face of these unnatural circumstances convinces Micah that the guide must have enjoyed a life even stranger, better versed in unnatural circumstance and human variety, than the filmmaker had originally suspected.
“Come here, Mtabi, I want to talk to you for a minute,” Izzy says, sitting up and running his eyes over the African’s rumpled blue suit and purple tie. “My father—may he rest in peace—first showed me how to knot one of those. I’ve been thinking about them a lot out here: the dead.” And here Izzy curls his face up toward the translator like some deep-sea creature breaking to the surface, a blowfish about to spit its poisonous message of defense. “Mtabi, I always wanted to ask you what you make of the people you work for as a guide.”
“Make of them, sir?”
“Yeah, what you think of them.”
“I do not know how to properly answer your question, sir. Their job is to look, my job is to show.”
“But what do you think they come here for? Really?”
“Some come to see the animals, some to hunt, some come for rubber and diamonds. Most think they know a place by seeing it. But they see nothing. To know a place, one must live the worst of it.”
“And what’s the worst of it, Mtabi?”
“Izzy,” his brother says, “that’s enough.”
“Don’t listen to him, Mtabi. He’s not the boss anymore. Tell me the worst of it.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Tell me, I want to know.”
“Ten years ago our youngest son died.”
“What of?”
“Diphtheria.”
“How old was he?”
“Two. He was two.”
“And there was nothing you could do?”
“No, sir. We traveled far, far for medication, but it was too late. This is the thing in life that has weighed heaviest upon my heart.”
“I never knew you had that sadness, Mtabi. I’m sorry to hear that. You know, in the West, there are inoculations for that sort of thing.”
“Yes, I have heard of such miracles.”
“It’s no miracle, Mtabi. It’s there, it’s a thing, it exists. You just don’t have it! In other words, apart from your son’s death being tragic and untimely, it had the added benefit of being wholly unnecessary. That’s not injustice, Mtabi, that’s comedy.”
“That’s enough, Izzy!” Micah barks, lunging for his brother. “You won’t insult him like that.”
As soon as he reaches him, Izzy snaps at Micah like a turtle and bites his outstretched hand.
“You rabid little faggot!”
Izzy ignores his howling brother. “I didn’t mean to insult you, Mtabi. I’ve just been thinking about the nature of suffering since I returned. Who gets what. Accidents of geography and time. Like me. You heard it straight from my brother: I’m a repulsive little Jew fairy. But out here I was happy, even if it was just for a little while. Do you understand that?”
“I think so.”
“But institutionalized suffering, the kind that turns people into numbers, that doesn’t even allow them to suffer uniquely—the forces at work that allowed your son to die unnecessarily—that’s got to be the worst kind, don’t you agree?”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing I’ve been working on. Tell one person something, it’s a secret. Tell a few, it’s a story. People start believing you, it becomes history. That’s what we were doing out here, Mtabi. Numbers, do you understand?”
For the first time in as long as they’ve known each other, the guide looks past clothes, custom, and context to see his clients simply as men.
“I do not know the personal significance of numbers,” Mtabi says. “I only know my son.”
“Listen to me, Izzy, you’re talking gibberish now,” Micah says. “We’ve got food and antibiotics, and we’re going to get you out of here, all right? But I need you to understand this: I’ve been stabbed, I’ve been hit in the side of the head with a gun, I’ve been subjected to a hot shave! These fellas back home aren’t kidding around. They want what’s theirs.”
“Or what? They’ll bring harm to someone you love? Too late for me, Micah. You made sure of that.”
“Izzy, where’s the goddamned negative?”
“Strange word, that.”
“Izzy!”
“Yes, Micah!” Spitting his brother’s name, and suddenly it’s twenty years before and they’re back in their shared bedroom. “You should have left me here,
you really should have. Why didn’t you leave me here? I could have done it. A little while longer and I think I could have done it.”
“How could I let you? I wouldn’t.”
“I know. Twins and all the rest of it … Well, you pays your money and you takes your seat. C’mon, then, you’ve come all this way. I want to show you something.”
FOUR
The filthy bedsheet has fallen away several paces behind Izzy, who now walks beside the other three with a naked body encrusted in sedimentary layers of dirt, rotting foodstuff, and excrement, the organ of procreation wagging before him a mere hopeless tentacle.
“Itz, put on some clothes, for Christ’s sake.”
“Nothing I’ve not seen before,” says Rose, marking that Izzy’s penis at rest is thicker, longer than Micah’s. She registers for the first time, too, that even with Izzy in tatters, the brothers look very much alike, their strides naturally complementing each other and seesawing into an easy, metronomic rhythm. In the daylight dazzle, Micah notes Izzy’s strange tattoos coming into relief, armies of black ants that emerge from navel and armpits and crawl across his limbs and shoulders and back, insects that gain a jangly, noble mobility as their keeper continues walking.
“What’s with the numbers, Itz?”
“Time codes. Best way to keep track of them. I’ve been working hard out here.”
“Listen, Itz, you should know this,” Micah says, trying to reach him with news from home. “Arthur’s dead. Mr. Waldo, too. Bumpy’s running the roost now.”
“Marblestone?” Izzy says, engraving in air each of the name’s three syllables. “I loved the man.”
“Me, too.”
Izzy steps around a puddle of mud. That the maneuver is performed conscientiously, daintily—in such a way that suggests his brother is still in there somewhere, that toothed gears still mesh with memory and response, that some fundamental codes of law and rationality still apply—comes as a relief to Micah.
They have hopped off the red carpet and are heading beyond the royal encampment toward the village outskirts in a direction unfamiliar to Micah. Pointing ahead, Mtabi says with some hesitation, “This way lies the dahtkam.”
“What’s that?” Rose asks.
“Each village has one. Not a graveyard exactly, but a resting place for things that have fallen out of favor. Instruments and items that have overstayed their usefulness. A place of many objects but little wisdom.”
“Like a dumping ground,” Micah says.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s where Izzy’s keeping the film?”
“This I do not know.”
Flat as Nebraskan badlands, for miles and miles the dahtkam stretched. As Mtabi described, the territory is a trash heap, a repository, a junkyard, a world of things made, unmade, an underworld living on the very surface of the village. Scattered across this Whitman’s Sampler of things unloved and unnecessary are stacks of tablets with outmoded stories from yesteryear; idols usurped by shinier, more brilliant gods; broken brooms and unraveled mats; punctured water bottles and leaky pots; grubby furnishings, bedding, and birth mats; heaps of smashed and irregularly shaped beads and ornaments; cracked flutes, crushed drums, and busted string instruments that look like undiscovered letters of the alphabet. There are, too, discarded bounties from trading expeditions and missionary visits from bygone times, mechanized wonders grouped haphazardly like river stones. There are heaps of metal paneling given over to orange oxidation and rust. There are nonsensical devices of convenience, electrical whisks and tin openers, an ancient Victrola player with an outstretched arm like an ice skater caught in mid-pirouette, weird pneumatic tubes and twisted Tesla coils, even, if Micah’s eyes aren’t deceiving him, an ancient cotton gin, its jaws stuffed with yellow discolored fluff, all these devices and mechanical advances rejected as outmoded impositions.
What was it about seeing other people’s trash that Micah found so poignant? Why did spotting sidewalk rubbish always trigger in him such profound emotional responses? Was it because a bit of the person who’d possessed it attaches itself to every item? Was it because trash held a special relationship with time and decay, each discarded newspaper page floating down the street a funeral shroud by another name?
Micah picks up what appears to be a perfectly functioning harplike string instrument. “Some of this stuff looks in pretty good working order. Who’s to tell the good from the bad?”
“Time makes that judgment,” Mtabi answers.
“There he is,” Izzy says, breaking free of the others and running ahead, limbs flapping in all directions, earthen shades of brown and green granting him chameleon-like powers of camouflage as he darts in and out of the ever-bending, never-ending slipstream.
Micah bolts after him, gathers force, and overtakes him.
“I’m not trying to get away,” Izzy says, loosening his brother’s grip on his arm and meeting his eyes. “I’m coming back with you, Micah.” He wrestles free and lurches forward again. “But there’re things you have to see first.”
Ahead of them again, dancing on the perimeter of the horizon line, cast in silhouette, merrily spastic, he might be the Grim Reaper himself leading congregants in a dance of death. “Here we are!” Izzy rings out at last, planting himself before an immense, barren tree from which hangs spectacularly strange fruit. “Here’s what I want you to see.”
The body’s arms and feet have been sawed off, its organs scooped out, the midsection a hollow flap, the skin a tough black leather emerged from a tannery. Every pod and pocket of the body has been peeled away and inverted. The tongue has been excised, the eyes gouged out. In its dimensions, coloration, and exposure of strata, the figure resembles the life-size human-anatomy cutaway model their father kept in his study, the one he’d place on the porch each Halloween. The corpse has been left hanging for weeks, a canvas for the sun to brand, a banquet invitation for hyenas and scavenger birds, a boulevard for field mice and insects to troll. In death the body has become a feasting ground, the cadaver a site of gossipy activity for maggots, worms, and flies. A dark patch of molasses-like dried blood has soaked and stained the grass and sand below the reddish brown of terra-cotta.
Izzy collapses before them on the ground and breaks the silence. “Rose, I’d like you to meet Cri. Cri, meet Rose.”
The three of them might not have registered the sight as the remains of a human being were it not for the series of photographs affixed to the tree. There are dozens of them, several for each day Izzy has been back, documenting the prince’s physical decomposition, a record of horror and deterioration that bristles each time a breeze stirs. First there is the documentary shock of the stumped and mutilated corpse, its face rotted, sun-stung, and picked at like a Thanksgiving bird, but still recognizably that of the prince. These early photos give way to pictures chronicling a bleary wash of sinew and bone and brittle scarecrow straw. In each of them, Izzy appears standing in the same spot beneath the corpse, posed in the same unnatural position.
“After Cri hung himself, the tribal council decided to chop off his arms and legs to make a lesson of him,” Izzy says as dispassionately as a waiter describing the day’s blue-plate special. “But the body was remarkably well preserved when I returned.”
“Why are you smiling in these?” Micah asks uncertainly.
“Someone points a camera at you, you smile,” Izzy says, stating the most obvious thing in the world. “That’s what you do.”
Mtabi faces away from the tree, the photos twittering like leaves, buzzing like insect wings. “This very bad muntu.”
“Izzy, I want you to listen very carefully to me now,” his brother says. “This is no way to honor your friend. We’re going to bury the prince properly, and I’d like you to give some thought as to where.”
Izzy, who has been pulling fistfuls of dry grass from the earth, slowly begins to nod. “Okay, Micah. I knew you’d know what to do. You always know what to do.”
Perhaps ten feet away from them, Izzy
’s Leica sits on a wooden tripod.
FIVE
The sun begins its descent, and the Malwiki villagers slowly emerge from their huts, like Lazarus awakened from the tomb. They gravitate toward the dahtkam like moons pulled into tighter orbit, the tribespeople accompanied by Keneally, his contingent of poker-faced British soldiers, and Talli—the departed king’s counselor, now improbably clothed in the dress of empire, as uncomfortable-looking in his buttoned blazer, tie, and jackboots as a child playing a bearded elder in a school play.
Once they are far away from Cri’s corpse and deeper into the flatlands, Micah asks about the film. “Have you destroyed it?”
“The footage?” Izzy says. “No, I need it. You know, Micah, legends of King Mishi’s patrimony were greatly exaggerated. He had a couple dozen children, sure, but most of them died in childbirth or infancy, as they’re likely to do around here. Cri was the eldest son. The others haven’t nearly come of age. According to Malwiki law, the line of succession ends with him.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“You’ll see. I’ll show you.”
Dusk blushes over the sky, and the villagers instinctively mass together and begin forming a line, as orderly a progression as Minnesota housewives waiting to see the latest Valentino picture. As Micah, Rose, and Mtabi watch, Talli stands beside a planted Union Jack collecting the villagers’ tickets—the same inscribed strips of bark they’d spotted earlier on the red carpet. An authoritarian figure even when comically outfitted, Talli appears even leaner, his physical bearing more a model of regimental discipline, than Micah remembered. So, too, Micah reads the man’s supreme baldness not as a sign of diminished virility so much as a triumph of scalp, muscled bands of forehead razing fields of follicles. During an interval in his ticket taking, Talli marks Micah, Rose, and Mtabi with an expression of recognition that might be called the opposite of kind.
O, Africa! Page 31