“Sexual Healing” was wafting from the other room as Carl emerged wearing the boots. Just the boots. I squinted. Was it possible I didn’t see his clothes? No, Carl was definitely nude, as naked as the day his pan-sexual, exhibitionist Creator made him. I sat on the bed and watched as he glided to the tiny corridor in my bedroom and began to undulate. His hands moved over himself as he swayed, his back arching and bending like a reed in a tide. In the dim light, the muscles in his legs stood out like the grooves in a tree trunk. He was a sensual and evocative dancer, throwing sinuous shadows on the walls, dancing as if lost in a trance. It excited me to think I was watching someone who no longer knew I was there.
At some point, he began to jump. His dancing grew more frenzied, and the boots made a loud smack! each time they hit the floor. I could see sweat beading on his temples. The boots banged out a rhythm, faster, as his hands carved the air. He spun and gyrated, and for one tense moment I thought he might erupt into a squatting Russian kick-dance. I thought anxiously about my downstairs neighbor. It would be a shame if he called the police before we’d even met. Finally, at fever pitch, Carl stopped—arms outstretched, head thrown back, full priapic splendor on display to his stunned audience. He stood, chest heaving, and we stared at each other. I pondered the etiquette. What now? Did I stuff dollar bills into his boots? At a loss, I fell back on my years of good upbringing and started to clap.
“Thank you,” he said with mock solemnity, bowing.
“Bravo,” I croaked. “Bravo.”
Carl took my hands. “Thank you,” he said gently, and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “That was fabulous. Thank you. And now, if you’ll excuse me …” He disappeared into the bathroom, leaving me limp on the bed. When he came out a few minutes later, he was wearing his pants and shirt, and holding out the boots.
“Do you have a bag for these lovelies?” he asked anxiously. “I don’t want to get them dirty.” How much dirtier could they get, really, but I kept my mouth shut and went to the kitchen for a plastic bag.
“I, er, got a little excited in the bathroom,” he called. “I just couldn’t help it. I cleaned up, of course. I used the small towel, not the bath one. I hope that’s all right?”
“Of course,” I replied expansively.
Carl retrieved his jacket and briefcase from the living room. “You’ve been wonderful,” he called. “You know,” he added, “I’d love to dress you up and take you out sometime. You could put me on a leash. I know some places we could go.” I thought for a moment. It was the logical next step, wasn’t it.
“We’ll talk,” I said confidently. The wine was wearing off and my coccyx was throbbing. I got more bags from the kitchen, and together we piled in the rest of his loot: dresses, t-shirts, panties, camisoles, the teddy. I wedged in the dinner plate when he wasn’t looking.
He reached for his wallet. “So what do you think?” he asked. “How much?” For a moment, I was confused. Wasn’t I supposed to be paying him?
“Seventy-five? A hundred?” He peeled the bills from a wad in his pocket and pressed them into my palm. “What a wonderful evening,” he sighed. “Thank you.” He kissed my hand, and playfully nibbled my fingers. “Gorgeous,” he said. “I’ll call you. We’ll go out.” He touched my cheek. “Don’t worry, I’ll let myself out.” I didn’t argue. And with a rustle of plastic bags and a last lick of my fingers, he was gone.
After the door shut, I turned and surveyed my apartment. The living room blazed with a startled, caught-in-the-act air—lights burning, music playing, but no one there. Empty wine bottles stood on the coffee table, and a few dresses lay on the sofa, the rejects. Panties, camisoles, and bras hung from the dresser drawers, festooning the knobs like the silken fallout from some sartorial apocalypse. The floor of the front room was littered with more clothes—dresses, skirts, even, inexplicably, my winter coat. I was sorry I’d relinquished my smart brown velvet blazer.
I turned off the stereo, and let the silence ring in my ears. The clock showed three A.M., and the front window glowed a deep, impenetrable black. Black, like my boots. I sighed, and wandered into the kitchen. All that wine had left me lightheaded and ravenous, but the fridge yielded only apples, scallions, and a bag of potatoes. I thought about calling my best friend back east, but she’d still be in bed. I could regale my co-workers in a few hours, but as most of them didn’t yet know my name, it seemed a bit forward. I’d briefly met the young mother down the hall, but it seemed unwise to wake her up and introduce myself.
I leaned against the fridge, overwhelmed by a need for normalcy. I stared at the potatoes. Bland, wholesome, soothingly starchy; they’d do. I heated a pot of water and examined my Prude-pink nails while I waited for the water to boil. I had a new appreciation for my hands after this evening. When the potatoes were soft, I transferred them to a bowl, took out a fork, and set about mashing them with fervor. I was ferocious, purposeful, as graceful in my dance of the potato as Carl had been in his. When I finished, I ate a few spoonfuls, shoveled the remainder into a plastic takeout container, and stuck a post-it to the lid: “We met downstairs the other day. Enjoy the spuds. #5.” I opened the door, tiptoed down the dark hall, and left the whole mess at the door of #6. Then I tiptoed back, maneuvered through the piles of clothes on the floor, and fell into bed fully dressed. Potato caked my lips and my teeth were sticky with wine, but it didn’t matter. My universe had expanded, gloriously. A pair of boots was a small price to pay.
After stints in San Francisco and New York, Juliet Eastland has landed right back where she started: Boston, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and children. Her work appears in anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and on the web. Since this trip, she has crisscrossed the country several times.
TIM WARD
Zombies on Kilimanjaro
A father and son walk above the clouds and discuss many things.
We had wound our way slowly down a steep slope to the bottom of a valley when we heard a sound like rolling thunder. A cloud of dust appeared far above us on the slope of the volcano.
“Rockslide,” said Fred, our Tanzanian guide, shielding his eyes with both hands to look up.
Fred had copper skin, a pencil thin mustache and an easygoing manner. Nothing seemed to upset him much; he applied the Swahili catch phrase, hakuna matata, “no problem!” to almost every situation. Even now, he seemed weirdly relaxed.
Not me. I could see what looked like small pebbles bouncing down the side of the volcano, careening like billiard balls into the top of the valley through which we were climbing. These tiny pebbles were a few kilometers away. Were they going to roll all the way down to where we stood? I looked around. Giant boulders littered the valley floor, some big as cars, some big as houses. Do we run? Do we hide? I watched, transfixed. I had to keep thinking of them as pebbles to keep myself from panicking. So this was why the Tanzanian government had closed the Western Breach trail to Kilimanjaro’s summit.
These frequent slides, I later learned, were the result of a “freeze-thaw” process. Subzero nights and hot days make the top centimeters of the rock face contract and expand, creating tiny fissures. It’s the same process that creates potholes on city streets. Water gets into the cracks. It freezes then thaws, again and again, forming wedges of ice that widen the cracks with each cycle. Like a slow-motion jackhammer the process fragments the outer shell of the volcano, eventually popping loose giant boulders just like the ones rolling our way now. It’s a fascinating geological phenomenon to observe, though at the time I was more interested in whether or not we were going to be crushed to death. I watched Fred closely for some clue to our danger. He seemed in no apparent rush to escape to higher ground. I couldn’t tell if this meant we were safe, or if we were in danger, but could not escape no matter how fast we ran, so hakuna matata.
The dust and the rocks eventually settled in place well above us. The thunder halted. Fred picked up his pack again and led us forward without a word.
We climbed up the far sid
e of the valley, hand over hand up a steep slope. Fred put Josh in the middle between us. Josh was my son, age twenty. This was the trip of a lifetime, climbing Kilimanjaro, a cool father-son bonding adventure. But he had been whacked with altitude sickness, and was suffering. On this our third day on the mountain we had climbed to just over 4,000 meters above sea level. The ascent had given Josh a massive migraine. It was painful just to watch him shuffle along with slow deliberate steps. I could see how each jarring slip on the trail sent needles of pain through his skull. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to stop. He kept going, his face pinched, mouth tight. Fred assured us relief would come as we got to lower elevations. Our camp for the evening would take us down 500 meters, and give us more time to acclimatize before our push to the summit.
Kilimanjaro is the highest point in Africa and at 5,850 meters (19,341 feet) above sea level it’s the world’s tallest free-standing mountain. While there are higher peaks in the Andes, Rockies and Himalayas, they are all part of mountain ranges. What makes Kilimanjaro so amazing is that it is a solitary, staggering mass of rock that rises straight up from the Serengeti plains where elephants and lions roam. It starts at near sea level, and soars to a glacier-fringed cone. The trek to the top is like walking from the equator to the North Pole in a week.
The other thing that distinguishes Kilimanjaro from the rest of the Seven Summits (the highest peak on each continent) is that one does not need ropes or mountaineering skills to climb it. Kilimanjaro is just a long, exhausting, but technically simple trek, and for this it has gained a reputation as “Everyman’s Everest.” Each year, as many as 40,000 trekkers attempt to make it to the volcano’s rim. Fewer than half succeed, however, mostly due to altitude sickness. Almost everyone suffers mild symptoms such as exhaustion, nausea, headaches and coughing. But in the worst cases, high altitude can kill you, fast. Fluids leak into your brain and can put you in a coma, or into your lungs and you can drown in your own juices; on average, altitude sickness kills about ten climbers a year on Kilimanjaro—many more than die in rockslides.
Over the crest, the trail dropped steeply, making the descent slow and tortuous. We passed a strapping young Danish man and his Tanzanian guide, taking a rest. The guide was carrying the young man’s pack (emblazoned with the red flag and white cross of Denmark). The Dane, seated on a rock, held his head in his hands.
“How’s it going?” said Josh.
“Bad,” the Dane groaned. “You?”
“Terrible. But we are all on our way down now. It’s sure to get better.”
The Dane smiled feebly. Josh turned to go. He hesitated, turned back, and gave the guy a big hug.
“Good luck!” said Josh.
“I feel like part of a club now,” Josh told me. “Brotherhood of the Splitting Headaches.”
The joke was a good sign. Another few hundred meters down, he was moving quicker, his head up.
“Dad, I’ve got a question,” he said, his voice suddenly upbeat. “Mythologies are memeplexes, too, right? Like the ancient Greeks?”
“Of course,” I said. I could hardly believe he was bringing the conversation back to memes.
For a good part of our hike I had been discussing with Josh this new theory of ideas that had captured my imagination. We had talked about how memes—ideas that replicate—can build up into whole systems of thought—religions, philosophies, political systems. That Josh was bringing the topic back to what I wanted to talk about seemed a real sign that he was feeling better. Or else he was succumbing to delirium.
“What we call ‘mythology’ is really just the religion of other people,” I continued. “We commonly use ‘myth’ to mean ‘something other people believe that we know is not true,’ like urban legends. In fact, the real characteristic of a mythology is that it explains the world in a coherent narrative. A mythology tells stories about how the world came to be the way it is, and why we are the way we are. In this sense, every religious system is a mythology.”
Josh described in detail a mythology-based video game he enjoyed playing, God of War, in which the player takes on the identity of a man bent on avenging himself against the Greek Gods. He kills them off, one by one.
“So it’s the thrill of being a mortal man,” I said, “and killing the immortals?”
“And he’s also having this fling with Aphrodite at the same time. He kills a God, then goes and screws the Goddess.”
“Well, I guess the makers of the game know how to hook their target audience,” I said grimly.
“No kidding,” laughed Josh. “My point was, you were saying how religious belief systems were memeplexes. Wouldn’t each video game be a memeplex, too?”
“I guess so,” I said slowly. “The idea never occurred to me.”
“Sure, each game creates its own world, defined by hundreds of memes. The player has to figure out for himself the rules of the game. He has to learn the strategies and skills to guide him along the way.”
“Ah, I see,” I said. “A game’s internal coherent reality is its mythology, just like any religion.”
We had to break off talking for a few minutes where the path dropped so vertically it felt as if we were scrambling down a dry waterfall. One or two quick steps could put you out of control and into a tumble. It put strain on a completely different set of leg muscles. My knees ached. Fred positioned himself at key spots and held our hands as we clambered down. I needed his support. I’m fifty years old, I thought, but I feel like a ninety-year-old trying to negotiate my way down a fire escape.
The valley into which we descended had a silver stream running down the center of it, bringing back plant life that we had not seen all day on our long walk through Moonland. For the first time we encountered a weird, new kind of tree, the giant groundsel. Fred said it was called the “Kilimanjaro Tree” because it only grew here and on a few other mountains in East Africa. These trees were shaped rather like giant cactuses, growing up to about fifteen feet tall, with huge branches that curved upwards from a single trunk at odd angles. The trunk and branches were covered with a thick mat of dead leaves. It looked almost like they were wearing puffy fur coats. Green, living leaves sprouted from the tops of the branches in big, fan-like, circular tufts. Some of these tufts had a straggly, flower-covered spike sticking up from the center towards the sky like peculiar, whimsical antennae.
“They look too wacky to be real,” I said to Josh.
“Like something out of Dr. Seuss,” he replied.
The small plain at the bottom of the distant valley was studded with hundreds of these crazy Kilimanjaro trees, but also speckled with dots of bright blue, orange, green, and yellow fabric. Some seventy tents were already pitched for the night. Fred explained that at this valley the Lemosho route to the summit merged with the Umbwe route. The trekkers from both trails converged here for the night, making a tent town, rather than a village. Seeing our destination gave Josh and me a final boost of energy. As the path eased off into a level walk, we picked up our pace.
As we walked I pondered these unknown and complex virtual worlds my son so effortlessly inhabited. As a teen, he had wanted to share his favorite video games with me. He would sit at my side in front of the computer and coach me through various levels. My hand-keyboard coordination was painfully slow, nowhere near fast enough for many of the tasks that came as second nature to Josh. Sometimes he would step in when I was failing and getting frustrated, and complete the task for me. I appreciated him for wanting to share what he loved. But I had not really appreciated until this moment that these imaginary worlds he navigated with such ease were meme systems potentially as complex as any mythological epic. I could see now that these role-play video games were very much like visual novels in which the protagonist could move about freely, discovering and exploring the landscape and characters within. How dull it must seem to gamers that a written tale has only one single pathway from beginning to end. I realized that for Josh the experience of coaching his struggling, ill-coordinated father at
the keyboard must have been something akin to trying to teach an illiterate man how to read.
We strolled into the valley, flat as a dry riverbed. The weird loopy-branched trees and the angular, bright-colored tents created a perceptual clash, as if Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali had painted the scene together on a single canvas.
Our little bowls of warm water were waiting for us beside our tent, as they were every day at the end of the trail. We splashed the dust and sweat from our faces, then went straight to dinner.
“Welcome macaroni and tuna!”
Our waiter, Sully, beckoned us to another surreal Kilimanjaro meal. I had thought perhaps this dish would mimic that old camping staple I had eaten round so many campfires in Canada: a box of Kraft noodles, a packet of cheddar cheese powder, a tin of tuna, and voila! Not so on Kilimanjaro. The noodles were served plain, like spaghetti. Onto it Sully ladled chunked tuna in an orange sauce that looked like cheese sauce but was in fact vegetable soup. The mixture looked remarkably like a bowl of vomit. But it tasted amazing: soupy and fishy and chewy with a hint of tomato and little bubbles of fat. Josh started slurping it down like a dog at his dinner bowl, the first real meal he had eaten since altitude-sickness hit him the previous day.
“Sully, this is the most delicious, fabulous meal I have ever had in my life!” he said.
Sully beamed with pleasure as we helped ourselves to seconds.
After eating, we sipped our tea by the light of the mushroom-tin candelabra and talked about the day. Fred entered the tent. He held in his hand an orange prescription bottle filled with little white pills.
“Diamox?” I asked.
Fred nodded. This was the only medication that alleviated the symptoms of altitude sickness. It could only be taken below 4,000 meters though, so Josh was not able to take it earlier in the day.
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