Do Wendy and I sound an improbable couple? Compared with Walter and Jane, we were a perfectly matched duo. Hear them arguing in public, and you’d be looking in the paper the next day for news of an axe murder. Not only that, look at the difference in their personalities. You could drop Jane down in the middle of Hell, and she’d calmly begin to make plans for the best way out. If I had to be lost in the middle of nowhere with anyone in the world (and I was) it would be Jane. Walter’s a lot less organized, and Jane insists that Africa without a hat has fried his brains. But he’s an original thinker, and he thrives on challenges. Between them they could tackle anything.
Anything…except Master Tunicate.
When he first put in an appearance I was already drowsing. Wine with dinner, then a port and four large sherries, with a wood fire at my back. I knew that Wendy was sober, and would drive us home. I didn’t take much notice as Walter took us farther and farther east, heading towards the source of the river. He was well out of the territory he was supposed to cover for the World Bank, but what else was new? Now he was traveling on his own budget, for the sheer hell of it.
River life, and swamps, and native huts, and dense stands of forest. And then, without warning, something that made me sit up in my chair. Walter advanced the carousel to show a new slide. Two native women stood there, stone-faced, one on each side of a massive, lumpy sculpture. I swallowed that sculpture in one look. Too big for life. But so realistically carved that I marveled at the detail.
“Walter!” He had been ready to advance the carousel again when I stopped him. “Where in God’s name did you take that picture?”
“Still awake, Steven? That’s a first. Wait a minute.” He switched on a table lamp to look at the notebook sitting next to the carousel. “I thought so. It was a little village called Kintongo, or Kitongo, I never saw it written down. What’s the interest? We thought you were asleep.”
Kintongo. Soon the whole world will know the name. But when Walter said it, the rest of us had never heard of it.
“Why the interest?” said Walter again. “I snapped the picture with a telephoto lens—mainly because the people in the village refused to be photographed. Otherwise I wouldn’t have wasted the film.”
“What’s that thing in the middle, between the two women?” I’m sure my voice was shaky.
“That depends who you believe.” Walter cleared his throat, and pushed back his floppy brown cowlick with his hand—I can see him do it now, as I sit here and write. “According to them, it’s a god. According to me, it’s a hollowed-out lump of wood. Not near as heavy as it looks.”
“No trick photography? I mean, it really was that size.”
“Certainly was. You know me, I always try to get something like a human, or a hand, or a car into the picture, to fix the scale. I had to wait a while until those two lovelies came out and stood in the right place. It’s maybe seven feet tall, top to bottom. So what’s all the excitement?”
“You didn’t know it, but you photographed a tunicate.”
Jane knows a lot of biology. She picked up on it at once. “Can’t be. Steven, I’m ashamed of you. You know better—a tunicate’s not a fraction of that size, ever. And you wouldn’t find one in eastern Zaire.”
I felt the curious frustration you get when you know fifty times as much about a subject as someone else, but don’t want to take the time to explain. I was a world’s expert on tunicates, for Christ’s sake—Jane was a smart amateur.
I didn’t argue. Instead I said: “Walter, can you get that slide in sharper focus?”
“I doubt it. But I can do better than that. Hold on a minute, I’m sure to have an eight-by-ten print in the other room. What the fuck’s a tunicate anyway?” He left the room.
All the alcohol seemed to have burned out of me. “I know, Jane.” I was almost stammering, and I felt short of breath. “I know. A tunicate, that far from the sea. And that size. A giant, fossil tunicate? Impossible, right. But if it’s not impossible—it’s a discovery. A major discovery.”
I have to digress here. There’s no way this can be told in any strict time sequence, anyway—not even in a logical sequence. So why try?
Life’s a bummer. Don’t laugh now, but I’ve probably spent ten thousand hours studying, reading about, and writing about tunicates, and chances are good that you’ve never even heard of them. But you have to understand them—well—if those dark later happenings at Kintongo are ever to make any sense to you. They make only limited sense to me.
Can we talk tunicates for a moment? Let me pursue that passion of mine one last time. It would be a waste of time to try to repeat exactly what I said that night to Walter and our wives. He’d been drinking pretty steadily, and he has a lot less body weight than me. Jane and Wendy caught on fast, but I had to repeat things three or four times before it got through to him.
We can go very quickly if you’ll accept some shortcuts. Wouldn’t do for the Smithsonian, but that’s a million miles away.
One other thing. There will be an inquiry into all this—bound to be. There are other materials, exhibits that prove everything I’m going to say. But I couldn’t bring them back with me. I’ll tell you where they are hidden as we come to them.
Now, having promised to talk about tunicates I realize I can’t afford to say it at all. Can’t afford the space. I’m a fifth of the way through Walter’s notebook and I’ve hardly begun.
It’s all in other books, anyway—look in any decent zoology text, under “Tunicata,” and you’ll find pages about them. They are the most fascinating creatures in the world (or out of it?). Are they plants or animals? Terrestrial tunicates are animals, definitely; but in their adult form they usually root to the bottom of the sea like plants. Are they vertebrates or invertebrates? Somewhere in the middle, with a start of a backbone that never becomes one. And they have an outer skin, sort of an exoskeleton, made of tunicin; tunicin is very close to plant cellulose, the nearest the animal kingdom ever gets to producing it. They have a heart and a circulation system—but no oxygen-carrying pigment like hemoglobin in the blood. What the blood does have is sulphuric acid; and vanadium, lots of it. They concentrate vanadium, but we don’t know how or why. Sometimes they look to me more like inorganic factories than natural animals.
I didn’t mean to start. It’s all in the books, and time is short, space is short, the river is calm now, and the boat is going like hell. We’ll be back at Kinshasa in a few hours. But I have to add one or two things more, because they are the central factors that brought us to Zaire and to Kintongo.
Size, and habitat. Tunicates don’t get much bigger than a small melon, even the biggest species. And they live in the seas and oceans, never inland. But pictured on that slide I saw the remains of a huge tunicate, seven feet tall, a thousand miles from the nearest salt water. My suggestion of a giant, fossil tunicate was a desperate one. It was all I could think of. But I know the fossil forms, and they’re small.
A fake? A practical joke, played on me by Walter, with the connivance of Wendy and Jane?
That’s not as silly as it sounds. Wendy was my love and my soulmate. But that couldn’t make us the same age as each other. Walter, Jane and Wendy were contemporaries, in college together, and they’ve been conspiring for a long time. Although I was in college during those same years, I took a while getting there. I’m nine years older than the others. Cross-generation talk and little friendly surprises for old Steven are no new thing. They sound bad. But I liked them. They always had a nice outcome, and they made me feel like someone special.
This wasn’t a fake. Walter produced the eight-by-ten and a lens, and we all had a close look. I explained what we were seeing.
Put your finger on that fifteen minute interval, if you want a starting point. One reason for getting together on Christmas Eve was to talk about next summer’s vacation. We did it each year. Usually the other three would propose Kenya, or
Madagascar, or Patagonia; I would counter with Rehoboth, or Atlantic City, or Long Beach island. Mostly we settled for a middle ground, and went to the Yucatan, or Rio, or Bermuda. Good hotels, good food.
Passion outweighs logic.
This time—Great God forgive me—I spoke first. For our vacation I suggested eastern Zaire.
Witness the advantages of technology.
The others laughed at my ideas of how we would get to Kintongo. Steamboat and native bearers, I had asked.
“United to Paris, then Air Zaire to Kinshasa,” said Wendy.
“Air Zaire?”
“Sure. Seven-forty-seven—don’t worry about it, American and British crew members. We won’t eat the food, and last time I wasn’t too keen on the state of the toilets, but that’s a detail. We could fly Kinshasa to Stanleyville, or whatever they changed its name to.”
“Kisangani,” said Walter. “Get that right, Wendy, or they’ll throw us all out of Zaire.”
“Kisangani. But that’s not as much fun as the water. We’ll rent a diesel-powered shallow-draft boat and take it along the river as far as Boyoma Falls; then on by mini-bus to Kintongo.”
“Piece of cake,” said Jane. “I’ll handle food supplies.”
“And medical, too?” said Wendy. “I’ll worry about visas and letters of introduction. Walter, will you cover transportation?”
“No problem. Just a rerun from last time. I’ve got all my old notes. We’ll need a small trailer as well as the bus.”
For a change there was no discussion of vacation choice. They were planning before I had thought through my own suggestion.
And the money for all this? Ah, there’s the real magic of Wendy and Jane and Walter. Grant-masters, all three of them. They knew the pools where the grant money swims, and what baited words would let you reel it in.
Piece of cake.
Sure. In my excitement I believed it. I still believed it when we set out up-river from Kinshasa, aboard a thirty-two-foot twin-engined Messerschmitt launch that drew less than two feet of water.
I was excited but uneasy. Walter’s slides were accurate, but some things they couldn’t tell. They didn’t capture the clouds of flies that chased us over the water—big flies, with a blue-black meaty body and a vicious bite. The slides couldn’t catch the feeling of the river, either, broad and lazy and somehow infinitely old and powerful. Self-satisfied. It didn’t notice us. When we have wiped ourselves out, or gone into space to meet our masters, that dark river will be there unchanged. I was afraid of it.
The flies annoyed, but they did not frighten—not then. They terrify me now. They are still here, there are scores of them in the cabin. I can stand them, but I dare not close my eyes. If I did, I would see again the three blue-black swarms, buzzing densely. And at the center, Walter, and Jane, and Wendy.
The boat was capable of eighteen knots, but we didn’t try for more than a fraction of that. We pushed our way steadily upriver, with Walter at the helm and the three-man “crew” sitting on the hatch, smoking and chatting to each other. They seemed able to ignore the flies. Two of them still carried automatic rifles, holding them casually across their laps. I had started to object when we first boarded, but Walter had taken me to one side.
“This is a military dictatorship,” he said quietly. “We’re here because the President’s office allows us visas and lets us be here. But they’ll keep a close eye on us—and if they don’t like what they see, we’ll be out.”
“But they’re carrying guns. Are they loaded?”
“They’re loaded. Get used to loaded weapons. And remember, don’t ask the crew to do any work. One of them knows how to handle the boat, but the other two are army officers. We don’t need them. They go with the territory.”
I dare not close my eyes to sleep now. I could not sleep then. The moment we boarded the ship I felt a throbbing tension beginning inside my head, darkening the ship and the face of the monstrous river. It was a band of pressure, the torture that I first experienced when I was just sixteen years old. It had forced me to seven wasted years of madness and despair.
I tried to eat dinner with the others, but I had no appetite. Soon I left them and went aft to watch the African sunset, a red sun plunging rapidly into gray, lifeless water.
And then I had my first hint of conspiracy among the other three. Walter, Wendy, and Jane were sitting in the forward cabin. I could see their heads, nodding back and forth beneath the electric lamp. They were leaning forward, and now and again one of them would steal a glance aft in my direction. I knew they were talking about me but I had no idea of their words. My head ached terribly, like a jet-lag that had grown worse and worse, and after a few minutes I rested it on the aluminum aft rail and gazed mindlessly down at the turbulent wake. The picture of Master Tunicate came into my mind. I felt a little easier. In ten days we would be in Kintongo, and I would have an answer.
The screws were only a few feet beneath me, threshing loud in the darkness, and I did not hear Jane approach. She put her hand down gently and rubbed the back of my neck and then my forehead. Her touch was cool and dry.
“Are you all right, Steven? Can I bring you a drink?”
That quiet, cultured voice. Just as though we were at a party back in Georgetown. I stood up and hugged her to me in that humid darkness, running my hand along her thin back and then around to cup one little breast.
“I love you, Jane,” I said. I had never before offered Jane an intimate touch, never said a word to suggest that I found her attractive.
She did not pull away from me, or turn her head to see if anyone was watching. “I love you, too,” she said. “We all love you. Try to be patient, Steven, we’ll be there soon. Come on. Wendy is worried.”
She took my hand in hers and led me forward, past the silent crew. Their cigarettes glowed in the dark, and the light of the rising moon glimmered off their eyes and the polished barrels of the guns. Walter and Wendy were still sitting in the cabin. They made a space for me and Wendy placed a brimming glass in my hand. I tasted it slowly, wanting to believe that Jane had somehow found a supply of sherry on one of her shopping trips into Kinshasa. It was bad gin and cheap vermouth. I cannot say it was a martini. We had no ice.
Six days of travel brought us to Walter’s chosen transfer point, thirty miles from the seventh and last cataract of the falls. We had stopped twice for fuel and fresh food, halts so brief that the second time the army men became angry. There was no beer on board. They wanted shore time for drinks and women. When Walter shook his head and spoke back to them sharply in French, they went sullenly to the bow. For the next hour they fired single shots at the white birds that flew or floated on the oily surface of the river. At a hit they would give out hoots of pleasure, but when I went forward to watch them they lowered their guns. After a couple of minutes of uncomfortable silence, they looked sideways at me and shuffled back to sit on their usual spot on the hatch.
I returned to the cabin.
“Good for you, Steven,” said Walter. “They don’t give a damn what I say to them, but they’re afraid of you. What do they know that Jane and I don’t know?”
What indeed? It’s an accident of nature that made me six-feet four inches tall and Walter eight inches shorter. The fire was in him, not me. And yet they were right. They knew.
When we left the boat and the steaming river I thought we would also leave behind the crew. The two armed men had other ideas. They piled into the bus right behind us. Walter offered no protest. He made sure that the third crew member would stay with the boat, then put us in gear and headed east. Kintongo was three days’ ride, over rough tracks. With the loaded trailer we couldn’t do more than twenty miles an hour.
The air lost its leaden humidity when we were half a day’s journey away from the river. We travelled in the early morning and evening, resting through the middle of the day. Walter, through some myster
ious system of his own, had arranged for caches of food and gasoline at villages along the way. We spent the hottest parts of the day and the middle of the nights there. The huts were filthy and primitive, and sanitation was nonexistent.
Our own hygiene was not much better. I wondered what my colleagues at the Smithsonian would think of me now. I, always so careful to shower well, to shave twice a day if we went out to dinner, to remove the grime from under my finger nails. If I had to wear a shirt for the second day, or go out in the morning with unpolished shoes, it was a major event. But it is astonishing how quickly we adapt. Now I did not comb my hair for days, or do more than run a wet cloth over my hands and face. And I was still a lot cleaner than our two unwelcome guests from the Zaire army.
We drove steadily east, into rolling country that rose infinitely slowly before us. The mini-bus was like a time machine, ticking off the years. Since leaving Kinshasa we had lost a century. This Africa had not changed since the 1880s. Steamboats and native bearers? Not even those. There were radios, certainly, and electric flashlights in the villages. At the sprawl of huts where we paused on our second day I saw a Sears, Roebuck label on a natives plaid shirt, and a carving knife made in Japan. But that was superficial change. I think their diet had not changed in centuries: smoked monkey or fish, fruit and cassava paste—relished, it seemed, by everyone except me. And the real villages came to life after dark, with firelight, drums, and dancing. The rhythms and movements were ageless. I felt the drumbeat driving into my head, until it fused with the pounding of blood inside my brain. I knew that syncopation before I came to Africa. It was my old torture.
I sat on one side of the fire and looked at Jane and Wendy opposite me. Heads close together, and now and then glancing my way. Whispering. About me. At last I stood up and wandered off through the village, out to the dark perimeter where animal night-noises replaced the drums within my skull.
I was able to breathe again. Tomorrow we reached Kintongo.
Dancing With Myself Page 4