by Mark Dunn
She was receptive. And she now believed that there was a very good chance that she was in love.
In the bush plane that took the two (along with two other Habitat crew-members) over the salt pans to the Okavango, Ericka and David sat in the back seat. (Roy, who had won the seat lottery for this particular flight, was next to the pilot, and Leonard—poor sad-sack Leonard who could never catch a break—huddled in the far back with all the luggage). It was hard to speak over the drone of the plane’s engine. But Ericka tried, nonetheless. She wanted to find out more about David, who hadn’t been all that forthcoming with details from his personal life. This, obviously, wasn’t the time or place to draw him out, but she definitely needed to know more about him if this relationship was to move forward.
Or would it move forward? She just didn’t know. But for now, all Ericka said was, “It has a stark beauty, doesn’t it? The landscape.”
“That’s some desert,” said David, who had very little of the poet in him.
There were a few attempts at singalongs over the campfire that first night, but mostly the group chattered away like the little monkeys who lived in the nearby trees, discussing all that they had seen during their first mini road safari. There was wildlife around every corner, and the lions were especially accommodating, the regal males allowing their human visitors to rumble right up to their open dens and impose upon their privacy without even a half-growl of protest.
Asked Soumeya of her vehicle’s driver, a congenial young Motswana named Jacob, “Are they tame? Why don’t they get upset when we drive up to them like this?”
Jacob smiled. “They don’t see you as prey. They also know that they’ll have the chance to come visit you tonight.”
“What do you mean?” asked Leonard, suddenly troubled by the thought of lions invading the campsite later that evening. With his luck, Leonard was sure that he’d be the first camper to get eaten.
“It’s a good idea not to leave your tents once you go in for the night.”
That night, David left the tent that he was sharing with Roy. He came over to Ericka and Soumeya’s tent. “I’ve got Amarula, if you girls wanna come out and join me for a nightcap.”
Amarula had become the official cream liqueur of the Serowe Habitat build of August, 1999. It was made with the fruit of the African Marula tree, a tree which, as legend had it, was favored by elephants, who enjoyed guttling the fermented yellow fruit and getting drunk. Considering the low alcohol content of the liqueur and the prodigious body weight of your average African elephant, nobody believed there to be much truth to the legend.
A potential visit by the lions of Moremi—now that, of course, was good reason to stay in for the night.
“Count me out,” said Soumeya emphatically.
Ericka thought over the invitation. “Maybe for a minute. It’s still early. When do you think the lions usually show up?”
“Around one thirty,” jested David. “The embers are still warm. Come sit with me.” David reached into the small tent to help Ericka out. She was still wearing her safari clothes. She and Soumeya had been sitting up, playing cards.
The night air was filled with the sounds of nocturnal animals broadcasting their moods, summoning their mates, commenting upon their pursuit by other more predatory creatures. Is he pursuing me? asked Ericka of herself, as David led her to the dying campfire.
The two sat for a moment without speaking. David reached out and took Ericka’s hand. She sighed. She felt like some lovestruck middle-schooler. In Africa everything you usually think about yourself gets pushed to the margins. Those more primitive, more sublimated parts of you rise impudently to the surface. Sometimes the elemental manifests itself in child-reversion: the need for food, for human comfort and companionship, the need to have one’s many fears put to rest. Most children learn in time how to combat their fears, just as a visitor to Africa learns to make similar adjustments to better appreciate the wonders and riches of the continent.
“Can you believe that we’re here?” she finally asked her fireside companion. “And not on some fancy linen-tablecloth safari. We’ve become a part of this place, haven’t we?”
“I guess you can say that.” David poured Ericka a cup of Amarula. It was better layered above crème de Menthe in a drink that the British expats called a “Springbok.” But Amarula straight up would have to suffice this night.
“David, I don’t know anything about you.” Ericka was looking up into the cloudless sky at Southern Hemisphere constellations that were unfamiliar to her.
David took a swig from the bottle, scanning the black firmament overhead. “What would you like to know?”
“What do you do with computers? My brother-in-law works for Citibank on Y2K.”
David chuckled. “It’s interesting you should say that. I work for a group that’s doing something similar.”
“What is it?”
“The techno think tank that employs me—we’re addressing the Y10K problem.”
There was a roar. It didn’t sound leonine.
“Hippopotamus, I think,” he said. “One of the guides told me that nighttime is when they generally make the most racket.”
“What’s the ‘Y10K problem’?”
“It’s all the potential software bugs and glitches that might emerge when the calendar year moves to five digits. Everything’s set up for four digits, you know.”
“You’re being serious? That’s eight thousand years away.”
“There isn’t a lot of urgency to my job. Sometimes I sleep in.”
“I have to ask you something, David. I don’t know any way around it. We’ve got two more nights of safari and then those last two nights in Vic Falls, and then the trip’s over. Am I going to see you—I mean, ever again?”
David set the Amarula bottle down and drew his legs up to his chest. “That was really to the point.”
“When you’re a schoolteacher, you learn not to obfuscate.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that I have to be very clear. I’m sorry, but don’t you think we’re starting to feel something for each other?”
“Yeah. Sure. Although I haven’t even gotten into your pants yet.”
“That was crass.”
“Was there some other way you wanted me to say it?”
“Just forget it. I’m sorry I brought it up. It just seemed like it was time to talk about where we go from here. Do you want to see me again?”
“Of course I do. But what I want these days doesn’t seem to matter very much. I’m in a kinda strange place in my life right now. Just kinda, you know, drifting.”
Ericka touched David’s shoulder.
“We’re all drifting. Things are so unsettled these days. In four months we’ll be entering a new millennium. I can’t even get my brain around that.”
“Call me in the year 10,000 and I’ll give you something to try to get your brain around.”
“I’ll bet we’re more alike than you think. We’re both looking for something. Maybe we’re looking for the same thing.”
“Could be,” said David. He reached over and pulled Ericka’s face toward his, and then gave her a long kiss. “I really want to get into your—I really want to make love to you, Ericka. I wish there was someplace we could go.”
Ericka thought for a moment. “We could go over to the showers. Do you have your flashlight? I could go into my tent and get mine, but Soumeya will try to talk me out of going.”
David got up. “I’ll get mine.”
“We’ll have to do it standing up. Those floors are icky.”
“Standing up is fine with me.”
“Of course, you know we’re not supposed to leave the campsite. We’re not even supposed to leave our tents once the fire dies down.”
“Would you rather we not? I’m okay with that.”
“I want you.”
“I want you too.”
The darkness around them was thick, almost palpable. Althou
gh David shone the beam of his flashlight on the ground in front of them, Ericka still took special care in where she put her feet. One of the female crewmembers had met up with a large snake of unknown hazard when she went to take her shower earlier that afternoon.
The two reached the dark cinderblock building that housed the sinks and showers. Within seconds David was pushing Ericka up against the wall and kissing her with unusual force. Ericka welcomed the sloppy animalism in his advance. She writhed and clawed in response. She groaned with matched volume. They ripped their clothes off and tossed them into one of the nearby sinks. David was inside her half a minute later.
“Whatever our differences,” said Ericka in that next bliss-filled post-coital moment, “I love you too much to let you go.”
Earlier, in the midst of fucking, David had said, “I love you, baby. Oh God, I love you, baby.” But now, spent and sleepy, he said, “Uh huh. Oh yeah.”
It wasn’t a lion that visited Ericka and David in the showers that tenebrous African night. It was a pack of hungry and prowling spotted hyenas.
Ericka was quite familiar with spotted hyenas. One of her students had delivered a paper on them when she had made the assignment in May (a rather self-serving assignment, to be sure) that each of her advanced biology students should take an African mammal (preferably one of the southern African mammals their teacher was likely to see on her late summer safari) and write a paper on it.
The gregarious spotted hyenas have long been regarded as maneaters. Some paleontologists have conjectured that predatory attacks by cave hyenas in Siberia delayed the migration of humans across the Bering Strait into what is now Alaska, perhaps for hundreds of years. Some of these facts flashed through Ericka’s head as David began shouting at the hyenas gathering in the doorway, chatter-laughing and bearing their canines.
Ericka picked up the flashlight set upon the side of the sink and began waving it. David grabbed up his pants and started flapping them at the animals, who continued to laugh—as was their hyenine wont—at the negligible defensive actions of the naked humans.
“Where is a lion when you need him?” David tossed to Ericka.
Ericka registered his display of manly pluck, even as terror continued to grip her. The two worked through loud shouts and the air-flaying of their disrobed clothing to push the three or four hyenas (in the darkness there seemed to be even more) out of the shower house. There was no door to shut, so the danger would not be averted altogether until the doglike creatures gave up on human prey for the night and trotted off to find their supper elsewhere.
Or unless David and Ericka were rescued. The latter occurred a couple of minutes later. Jack Darrigan and two of the guides, having heard the commotion, showed up and successfully chased the four-legged predators away. There wasn’t time for Ericka and David to dress before the three men stepped into the shower house.
“The same thing happened with a couple of last month’s White Campers,” said Jacob. “I forgot to tell of the spotted hyenas.”
Jacob was staring at Ericka’s pubic jungle. In his defense, it was impossible not to.
Over breakfast that morning there was only one topic under discussion. Ericka and David laughed off their encounter with death and both accepted without complaint the good-natured ribbing of those who knew exactly why the two had found themselves in such a predicament. Ruth, the oldest of the group and the most devout, was the least judgmental: “The Lord protects those who love so deeply.”
Did Ericka and David love each other so deeply? Was their love, like their naked rendezvous with the man-eating spotted hyenas, something that could jolt them from the doldrums of their fairly vacuous, monotonous lives? Africa, in all its glory, had shown Ericka that there was life—wild, unpredictable, impetuous life—outside of the Greenwich high school where she taught, outside the narrow confines of her stultifying daily routine, outside the small circle of somnolent, adventure-deprived family and friends who kept her dully circumscribed.
Was Africa just a temporary flash of light—an isolated, fugitive moment of emancipating sensuality? Or was it a foretaste of all that could be?
Ericka and David dated long-distance for four months after returning to the States—long enough to greet the new millennium (as the consensus of opinion on century beginnings and endings at the time dictated) together, David pistoning on top and Ericka thrashing below, her eyes pinned to the digits of her clock radio, hoping for perfect millennial-coital synchronicity.
They were off by two and four minutes, respectively.
The next week they parted.
The break-up was amicable. David was a good lover, a most generous lover, but he was not any of those other things that Ericka had sought in a mate. But it came down to one thing more important than anything else: Ericka wanted to return to Africa. She wanted to join another Habitat build, either in Botswana or in some other country. And she wanted David to come with her.
But he had done Africa, and that was that.
She couldn’t help thinking, couldn’t help imagining whom she might meet on that next trip. Would he take her as David had? And then would they stay together, grow old together? Ericka Prager desperately wanted someone to grow old with.
She had built houses in Africa. Now she wanted to put mortar between the cement blocks—the “bricks”—of her own life.
2000
CONVERGENT IN CONNECTICUT
“I don’t know what happened to little Catherine Gallagher. I have always nurtured the wish that she should have a very long and happy life.”
Catherine Uhlmyer Gallagher Connelly had been about the business of living a very long (although not uniformly happy) life when Ericka Prager first visited her at her Wilton, Connecticut, nursing home in early January. By Catherine’s 107th birthday two months later, the two had become friends. In fact, by early April, Ericka had made friends with several of the other nursing home residents, including a woman named Eunice Ludden—mother of the famed Ludden Sisters singing group—who confessed to Ericka that she wasn’t an official resident of the facility but was working undercover to investigate patient abuse; and Karen Bailey Kelly, the daughter of famed Boston novelist Dennis Bailey. (Karen had her own connection to sororal singing groups, having written a biography of the Brox Sisters in 1953.)
It had been Ericka’s friend and fellow high school teacher Shannon Humphries’ idea for Ericka to accompany Shannon and her advanced history students as they each chose a long-lived occupant of the facility and wrote down his or her oral history. The students had a large group of colorful and interesting senior citizens from which to choose; as testament to the migratory nature of Americans over the last one hundred years, the residents hailed from forty-one different states, including Alaska and Hawaii. There was Mr. Grimm, retired administrator of a Presbyterian boarding school in central Utah; and Mrs. Daltry, the wife of a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who had assisted in the investigation of the accidental dropping of a bomb on a rural South Carolina community in 1958; and Frieda Chapman, whose husband, a U.S. Navy captain, was severely injured during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Even after the project was completed, Ericka and Shannon continued to visit the nursing home every weekend, each looking forward to attending May 27’s “Celebration of Tri-century Centenarians.” The special ceremony (with punch and cake and a visit by Senator Joe Lieberman, who was believed to be on Al Gore’s short list for vice-presidential running mate that year) would honor fifteen of the home’s residents, who, having been born in the “Gay ’90s” and having been blessed by the “long genes,” were now in the unique position of having lived in three different centuries (if one is to stipulate, of course, to the debatable claim that the twenty-first century owns title to the year 2000).
New Englander Ericka and Mississippi-born Shannon had met at the University of Vermont. Both had been education majors and both had eventually roomed together in a rental house with three other coeds: Tian Gilliam, the adopted daughter of Montana r
anchers; Claudia Wilmer, heiress to the Wilmer-HearMore Hearing Aids fortune; and Lindsey Royce from Gainesville, Florida, who was later called “One of America’s Thousand Points of Light” by President George H.W. Bush after she rescued an older woman, Josephine Charles, visiting from Derry, New Hampshire, from her car when it accidentally went into the Winooski River. In an amazing and somewhat disturbing coincidence, Shannon’s own nephew and niece were in the car with their father when it went into Arkabutla Lake in Mississippi that very same year (all three rescued themselves successfully; Shannon’s sister Bianca, alienated from her husband at the time, wasn’t present.) The five University of Vermont education majors, each hoping for a career teaching at the high school level, lived, coincidentally, next door to a retired high school principal named Cornell Rodgers (whom they called, with private mischief, “Mr. Rodgers”).
Shannon’s other sister, Heather, who resided in Hernando, just south of Memphis, suffered a nervous breakdown of unknown origin in 1996 and maintained only tentative ties to her sisters in the years that followed. Shannon and Heather’s parents, Piddy and Billy Humphries, lived for many years in their native Yazoo City, Mississippi, before moving up to Memphis, where Billy got a job as manager of a movie theatre in Whitehaven.
Ericka’s 107-year-old friend Catherine, who was nearly blind with cataracts and very hard of hearing, wasn’t as close to Ericka as was the old woman’s roommate, who had just joined the Centenarian Club in March. Gail Hoyt Hopper Rabbitt, who could not say that her one-hundred-plus years were nearly so tragic as those of her fellow centenarian, Mrs. Connelly (for whom the General Slocum steamboat fire of 1904 cast a cloud of dark remembrance that scarcely subsided during all the many years of her later life), had, nonetheless, enjoyed a far from trouble-free life herself. In early 1926, Gail’s first husband, Tillman Hopper, and his two brothers took all of the money that comprised their large family inheritance and put it into an invention of Tillman’s brother Hezekiah’s ingenuity and design: a life preserver with attached battery-powered propellers, called the “Poseidon-Peller.” The business the three brothers formed was doing well until the Stock Market Crash of 1929, when they lost their shirts, and Tillman, in despair, took a swan dive from his and his wife’s twentieth-story apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As might be guessed, he didn’t survive.