“Izzy! I came here to bring the picture back with us so you don’t end up reading about me in the goddamned obituary pages. They fucking followed me to California. They’ll kill us if they don’t get what’s theirs.”
“Give me one more night. Leave me be for the day and allow me one last performance. Then, I promise, we’re done.”
Rose and Micah make love. It isn’t the fizzy, happy romping of Micah’s boy-wonder days, when the girls were juicy, uncomplicated fun—a young satyr’s equivalent of a birthday boy gorging on hamburgers, french fries, cola, ice cream, and cake, astounded at the variety of pleasure that could be yielded from roundness, softness, wetness, sweetness, and coolness. Nor is it for Micah about a solitary absenting of self: his working toward orgasm an expression of the urge to ride oneself like an elevator and burst through one’s own roof. Tonight is different. Tonight—their first time together since Rose’s miscarriage—is a measure of resolve.
Over the course of the affair, Micah always took for granted that he was the one who provided glamour in Rose’s squalid life. It is clear to him now, however, that she is the true source of bedazzlement. She is his spiritual adventure, his exquisite, ecstatic love. It isn’t the best they’ve had together—they’ve been through too much in recent weeks, blanketed by injury, jangled by shifting time zones, their accommodations too uncomfortable, their bodies suddenly too near to middle-aged for the full acrobatic waterworks—but their reunion is sweet and tender nonetheless. And when it’s over, Micah says to her three words he has never said before. At their signal Rose gets up—on thick, womanly thighs, no longer the lithesome legs of a young woman—moves to a corner of the hut, sits down, folds her arms around her knees, and begins rocking back and forth.
“Why are you crying?” he asks.
“Because you had to drag me all the way out here to say it.”
SEVEN
“It’s gone,” Izzy says to Micah and Rose the next night once they’ve regrouped at the outskirts of the dahtkam.
“What’s gone?” Micah asks, dreading the answer but heartened to find his brother, still emaciated and holy-looking as an El Greco monk, dressed in dungarees and crew-neck T-shirt.
“The film is missing. I spent all night cutting it together, and when I woke up this afternoon, it was gone—the reels, the B-roll, all of it.”
They are trotting uphill, Micah holding Rose’s hand, Rose holding Izzy’s hand, the three of them a gang of lonely children who have just taken a blood oath. Dusk paints rouge across the early-evening sky, and around them the Malwiki are sitting on their mats awaiting the evening’s performance, the drummers going full bore. By the time they arrive, the movie screen is already unfurled, bristling with light and pulled tight as a bedsheet, that expanse of childhood wonderment. In the distance, standing firm atop the projectionist’s bluff, a familiar figure negotiates the power generator as handily as a suburban dad pulling the chain on a lawn mower.
“Izzy?”
“Yes?”
“Is that Mtabi I see operating our machinery?”
“Yes, I believe it is.”
Micah, Izzy, and Rose stop where they are, ready to accept whatever wisdom their guide has in store for them. In the event, the translator has not altered the evening’s program at all. It is the longest selection Izzy has edited for the villagers so far, a series of simply presented shots, long takes, in which the entire cast of the departed make appearances in and out of costume. Mtabi did not tamper either with the meaning that Izzy had spent the night assembling from the footage, a simple message that resounded in sequence after sequence: good-bye. Every shot ends with figures turning away from the camera, or walking out of frame, or waving farewell, or fading to black. Izzy had decided this on his own: If he could not mount a challenge against the medium’s compulsory present tense, he could at least use it to say farewell.
After an hour or more of this, during a moment that finds King Mishi looking directly out over the crowd, his face at its most serene and benevolent, Mtabi lights a match and sets it to the jumping filmstrip. At first the tear in the film appears like a blotch of shaving foam on the king’s left cheek. Then the bubbling hole bursts open—changeable, amorphous forms overtaking the center of the screen, an implacable whiteness that rips through and dissolves the image of the king’s face as it spreads to each of the screen’s four corners. The rupture is over in an instant, and it leaves behind a blinding blank radiance.
“Let him do it.” Izzy raises an arm of restraint against Micah’s torso, but the limb meets with no resistance. Instead Micah collapses backward on his rump, raising cartoon clouds of dust.
“It’s the best thing we’ve done,” Micah says in a voice void of protest or self-pity. “The best I’ve got in me.”
“I know. Me, too.”
“Without it Imperial’s going to go bust. I’m dead broke, too.”
“Transporting a movie projector to the interior of Africa isn’t cheap either, you know.”
In the distance Mtabi can be seen liberally watering the industrial equipment with the contents of a gasoline can. The projector catches fire, spraying flames into the sky, reels continuing to spin like wheels on an overturned bicycle, sending licks and crackles sparking in all directions.
“I’m finished,” Micah says, thinking of Bumpy and St. Clair awaiting him back in New York.
“We’ll shoot around it.” Izzy laughs, craning his neck up to follow the tendrils of smoke and flame that spiral upward and diffuse into the heavens.
Then, very quietly, Mtabi leaves his station beside the molten projector, turns off the power generator, and makes his way down from the bluff through the silent seatscape. Single-handedly, he uncoils the rope that anchors the screen on the left side, then the one on the right, allowing the scrim to cascade down its length and fold in on itself like a deck chair. Standing before the assembly where the screen once billowed, Mtabi speaks in the villagers’ tongue very simply. Though the brothers cannot decipher the language, they instantly recognize its message. Mtabi explains that King Mishi is bidding his kingdom and subjects farewell, that he loves them all and wishes them well, and that his last gift to his people is a promise to leave them in peace. For the benefit of the travelers, he speaks in English: “This ocean of hours we are all the time drinking—it, too, must end at the shore.”
Something happens. In unison the hundreds of villagers kneel on their mats and bow their heads before the translator, a pose of supplication that can mean only one thing: that gentle Mtabi, prudent Mtabi, watchful Mtabi, wise Mtabi, is now, in fact, King Mtabi.
“Looks like you’re the big boss now,” Micah says once Mtabi reaches the three of them, his head hanging in shame and embarrassment for having destroyed the brothers’ work.
“King?” Mtabi asks in wonderment.
“Yes.” Micah nods. “It’s what Mishi would have wanted.”
“I did not do this thing to wrest the mantle of power.”
“We know. All the more reason you’re the man for the job.”
“And what might be your first royal decree?” asks Keneally, lifelong habits of sycophancy propelling him toward the newly installed monarch. “Your Excellency, King Mtabi?”
“Arrest this man,” Mtabi says, pointing to Talli, whose stature has shrunk over the events of the past several minutes, “for the crime of high treason and his role in the untimely death and desecration of Prince Cri.”
“Very good, Your Highness,” says Keneally, signaling with a whistle to his men, who scoop up Talli and march him off, the traitor’s bright red tie fluttering behind his shoulder like a hand waving from the deck of a ship.
“I’ve got a question for you,” Micah asks Mtabi after the commotion settles down. “How’d you figure out how to work the projector?”
“There is in the West”—says Mtabi demurely—“what you call ‘a quick study’?”
“Indeed. Eh, King Mtabi,” Micah says, trying out the appellation, “you know, there w
as also a good deal of footage apart from what was screened just now.”
“Oh, I made certain to destroy all of the film through various and sundry means, by fire and water and trampling it into the ground.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh. And you’re aware that what Izzy’s been showing each night is a kind of duplicate, what we call a ‘work print,’ right?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re saying you located the negative?”
“This is the inverted image?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Oh, yes. This was fed to the hippopotamus, the angriest of all the animals.”
“Well, you really thought of everything, then.”
“Yes, sir.”
Micah smiles. “You’re the king; don’t call me sir.”
It is then that Micah’s ears tune in to a different, higher frequency, recognizing sounds he has not heard since childhood religious training nearly sixteen years before. His brother, who has slipped away, now leads the African tribespeople in an ancient form of call-and-response, the essence of his plea too singular for misunderstanding. Good-bye. Good-bye, King Mishi. Good-bye, Prince Cri. Good-bye, Arthur and Spiro. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. Izzy’s farewell, his final gift, a shared shibboleth of mourning:
“What wonderful tongue is this?” asks King Mtabi. “What is the meaning of this beautiful chanting?”
“It’s a prayer,” Micah answers, his face agleam. “A prayer for the dead.”
ONE
Izzy slept little aboard Captain Späten’s boat, rising like Caligari’s somnambulist from his hammock to wander around the decks in darkest night. It was only when Micah thought to nestle his brother in a crib—a giant equipment crate packed with straw—that sleep came deep and dreamless. Izzy was slowly returning to his brother. He was dressing like a modern-day New Yorker, was taking food regularly, had asked about details of Marblestone’s funeral and the Academy Awards dinner, and had even begun hatching plans as to how they might find ways to appease their Harlem benefactors now that their investment had turned to dust.
Other things went unspoken between the brothers. In order to enter into this tentative reunion with himself, Izzy first needed to say good-bye to others. The fact of Cri’s death—that is, the status of his being no longer alive—meaning that he was forever, irrevocably, dead. That work—the work of loss, the work of cessation, the work of oceanic grief, the work of things irretrievable, the work of never again—occurred alone, in private, in the darkness of the crate.
While Izzy worked on this fragile project of reclamation, Rose grew more anxious the closer to home they approached, pushing against each of the various modes of locomotion that propelled them forward. She wished the ship would split to splinters, that the train would fly free of its rails, that the airplane would drop from the sky. She longed to be delivered to any fate, any dramatic disruption, that might delay the inevitable moment when she returned uptown and took up residence in her apartment with her barber and Micah was reunited with his family—the moment when, separately, they conformed to the contours of their normal lives.
Home: that warmest, most sentimental, most commodious of words, but one not without its broken windows, damp cellars, busted boilers, creepy attics, and dead cats. As she had hoped it would, travel had neutered hypotheticals about home. The question of who she was had at last become personal. But the trip also produced unexpected reactions in her. She disliked what she’d glimpsed of Old Europe; Britain seemed to her a hunched and haunted place, an aquarium country whose citizenry moved at half speed. Africa she found poignant, but if she was honest with herself, likely of no more personal significance because of the color of her skin than it might be to Micah or Izzy. Beautiful, blasted, and medieval, Africa as she’d experienced it was many, many lives removed from the ruptured reality of her daily urban life.
No, if anything the trip confirmed to Rose that she was undeniably, indisputably American, from the food she ate to the clothes she wore to the words she spoke to the thoughts she thunk. America was home. The place also told her daily, in infinite ways, that she held no purchase on its dream. How she loved her country and how she hated it! How open to possibility and wretchedly preordained it was. How the tall buildings sang to a person’s mightiest aspirations while concretizing her insignificance. Only in America might she have found a character like Micah; only in America might they be asked to hide from others. Home. The word rang like a prayer and a curse.
They aren’t seated together on the plane, and the last leg of the return trip, aboard a fifteen-passenger Ford Tri-Motor 5-AT, is lousy with turbulence. Micah makes a point of leaving his seat every so often and working his way down the narrow aisle to check on her, but as the plane pinballs across the sky, its alternating jolts and gliding gusts provide commentary on Rose’s rising and falling fears.
“I’m scared.”
“It’s just an updraft,” Micah says, referring to a particularly rough spell.
“That’s not what I mean.” Squeezing his hand during a steep drop in altitude.
“Excuse me,” Micah says, turning to the fiftyish woman sitting across the aisle from Rose, the cardboard-stiff expression of the passenger’s dark sable stole matching her surprise at Micah’s request. “We know each other—would you mind swapping seats with me up front for a minute?”
Looking at Rose, at her beautiful, imperfect face, Micah recalls some of their greatest hits: Honeypot cloakroom. Under the boardwalk. The Ambassador in Hollywood. By the train tracks. And simpler things. Water pistols. Shadow puppets on the wall. Finger gougings from peanut-butter jars, their shared attempt to eat the whole rotten world by the gobful. Her face. Her need.
“Listen, Rose, let’s agree not to do this. Let’s not have the talk like the one that’s happening right now between a thousand husbands and wives. Let’s agree that’s not how we got this far together.”
“You’re right, Micah. Talking was never our strong suit.”
“Y’know, I had that same dream again the other night.”
“About the overcoat?”
“Yeah, only this time, after the man left the theater with it, I followed him and chased after the guy and finally caught up to him.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“I don’t know. He looked familiar, like someone I know, but I couldn’t recognize him.”
“So what’d you do? Did you tell him he’d taken the wrong one? Did you get into a fight?”
“No, I let him keep the fucking coat.”
“Hey, look,” Rose says. “There’s home.”
“It looks different from up here.”
“It does. You know what happens now, right?”
“Yeah, hon, I do.”
They remain seated together for the last leg of the return, science and ingenuity and will catapulting them toward New York, the city looking crystalline and vulnerable from this vantage. As they make their final descent, towers rise into focus like slices of many-layered cake overloading a platter. The yawning metropolis—curving, arcing, bending—from this perspective confident in its assurance at being the greatest thing ever built or imagined by human hands.
TWO
It is the dead of night when Micah enters the apartment. His plan is, as silently as possible, to have a bath and a shave (these ablutions always being the first things he does upon returning), sort through the mail, have a cheese-and-salami sandwich and a glass of milk at the kitchen table, then fix himself a scotch. He’d carry the drink with him from room to room as he made a quick, Cro-Magnon survey of the place, marking his territory and checking in on his things and his boys, before planting himself with his drink in front of the sitting-room window to take in the twinkling cityscape. Mine, mine, mine. All of it.
He is surprised to find Margaret not only awake and waiting up for him but sitting in the living room, a fire licking at her outline, as alive and alert in her white slippers and nightgown as a wintry bird circling a cornfield. Her pos
ture is that of a prize student poised to challenge an inexperienced teacher, and Micah is exhausted and unprepared at this late hour to entertain the performative function of marriage. He doesn’t feel like ramping himself up for conversation or confession.
She came from one of New York’s most established Protestant families, and though their backgrounds were dissimilar, they matched up well physically. Her tendrils of auburn, copper, and orange resembled a Hudson Valley landscape in October, and her handsome face—thin lips and aquiline nose set within square and rectangular planes—might have pleased an abstract painter. She was taller than Micah, and strong, with anomalously biggish hands. Even her name, which shared with his a first initial, spoke of a kind of grim determination, dutifully climbing a staircase of syllables compared with Micah’s syncopated, fleet-footed two-step.
“You’re awake,” Micah says, laying down his bags, flipping through his mental manual of marital feints and dodges. “I wasn’t expecting to find you up so late.”
“I thought I’d wait up.” Then, more formally, “How are you, Micah?”
“Good, though my nose is so sunburned I can’t touch it. I brought this for the boys!” Holding by its neck a two-foot-tall wood-carved giraffe. “How are they?”
“I put Ben and David to bed hours ago. They were desperate to see you, but tomorrow’s school.”
He welcomed the news, welcomed hearing his sons’ names. Since the burning of the film, he longed to return to his boys, to put his arms around their bony shoulders and smell their hair, to inhale the fantastic fragrance of youth. He wished again to take up the mantle of the heroic father of their infancy, the spinner of stories, wizard of wall shadows, virtuoso of voices, wearer of blanket capes. “Tell us a story,” they’d beg him the nights he was home, the boys in duplicate a reminder of the enchanted cave of intimacy he’d shared with Izzy in childhood. “Tell us a story,” they would plead, and it pleased him that his boys’ fondest wish corresponded with his life’s work.
O, Africa! Page 33