Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “So this is why you’re running away?”

  “Hey, I’m not running away. I’m running to. Can’t anyone tell the difference?” People nearby turned his way; it seemed all of a sudden he was shouting. “I’m going over to see my daughter,” he explained.

  “Ah.”

  “We’re not sure what she’s up to these days, but we’re worried. She’s been gone for a long time. She went on this junior year abroad to China.”

  “But we are flying to Africa.”

  “See, that’s the thing—her junior year was last year.” He sighed. It was a chore, talking to new people, making yourself understood. “She’s got the travel bug bad. She was supposed to come back after China, but she went to Thailand instead. Then Cambodia. Vietnam. Then Nepal, and India, and on and on. Now Africa. Typical Danielle: even when she fucks off, she finds a way to overachieve. Care for a Tums?”

  “No thank you.”

  “She’s off the grid, basically. We e-mail her every week, but it’s like shouting in a void.” He popped another antacid in his mouth, cracking the hard shell between his molars. “Maybe once a month she drops by an Internet café and writes a few lines. Then the power goes off because of a monsoon or whatever. Just saying hi. And oh, by the way, she’s not coming back to school this year after all. Did she ever let them know this down at the Bronx borough president’s office to which she’d made a good-faith commitment? No. Did she get in touch with her suitemates at NYU so she has a room to come back to? No. Did she make contact with the administration office or the financial aid people or her academic adviser or anyone whatsoever to let them know her plans? No. Hasn’t had time. She’s too busy unwinding, see. That’s her word, unwinding. Which turns out to be code, by the way, for getting loaded on ecstasy and tooling around the beach in a sarong, while some horny Israeli guy just out of the army makes you his love slave. Why not just stay in college? It would have been easier and cheaper all around.”

  “Sometimes a child needs to get lost,” his companion observed with irritating serenity. “Otherwise they never learn to find their own way.”

  “I thought that’s what junior year abroad was for. You go to some other country and hang out in strange bars getting drunk with people who speak another language. But you don’t go abroad from going abroad. It’s like answering a question with a question.”

  “Maybe your daughter likes being off this grid of yours. Maybe she’s found a new grid she likes better.”

  “Yeah. That’s what we’re afraid of.”

  Gloomily he peeled off another Tums, studying his reflection in the black window.

  “And Africa?”

  “Africa.” He shuddered; the word, even now, conjured in him a strangeness. He thought of all the explorers he’d read, all the times he’d lain on the carpet down in his basement gym, gazing up at the map, at that huge, top-heavy continent shaped like a question mark. “Christ knows. We’re still piecing it together. My wife thinks it has to do with the boyfriend.” He sighed. “She says she misses us. I mean, that got us worried, let me tell you.”

  “Please, take a Kleenex. Your head is perspiring a great deal.”

  “It is?” He wiped his forehead; sure enough, the tissue came back inlaid with beads of sweat. The pressure gauge in his forehead was oscillating wildly. He eyed the plastic vomit bag in the seatback in front of him with real seriousness of purpose. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I can’t seem to digest things anymore.”

  “You must be careful. You are not someone who should travel by himself, I don’t think. Especially outside the capital.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “If not your daughter, then I suggest you arrange for a guide. There are many guides now. You can find them outside all the hotels. So many important people coming to Africa these days for their special and unique experience. One week they tour around, maybe two. Then pfft—time to go home and raise awareness.”

  “That’s kind of cynical, isn’t it? At least they’re over here trying.”

  “Yes, you Americans like to try, don’t you? Trying is good, you say. Trying is almost doing.”

  “Well, it’s better than not trying.”

  “Is it?” Her gaze turned dry. “In what way?”

  “All I mean is, who doesn’t want a special experience, when they’ve come so far? I know I do.”

  “Perhaps you will have one then. But are you in condition for such a thing? You look so white in the face.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

  Except was it possible to be perfectly fine and also not fine in the least? For all the reading Teddy had done, he was still new to the practicalities and procedures of the exploration business. Still given to rookie mistakes. He had, for example, according to the guidebook, somehow managed to pack the wrong shoes (loafers), the wrong luggage (suitcase), the wrong soap (Ivory), the wrong money (cash), and, he was increasingly certain, the wrong malaria pills entirely. He knew they were the wrong malaria pills because they appeared to be giving him malaria, not protecting him from it. But maybe that was how the pills were supposed to work: inversely, like a vaccine. A little dose of the thing you feared, to ward off the larger one.

  For that matter he’d probably got the wrong vaccinations too. He was no doctor. He’d been in a hurry to get out, and the guidelines were ambiguous on the subject.

  “Entirely your call,” Dr. Wainwright, who was a doctor, had told him back in Carthage. “I’ve checked the CDC guidelines. With the yellow fever, it depends how far out of the city you go.”

  “I don’t know how far out I’ll go.”

  “Then it’s difficult to advise you,” Wainwright said.

  “Tell me, does the shot hurt?”

  “A three-inch syringe needle in your arm? Of course it hurts.”

  “And are there side effects to such a shot?”

  “Of course there are side effects.”

  “Like what?”

  Thoughtfully, or with the appearance of thought, Wainwright leaned back in his chair, stroking the clefts of his angular chin. As Teddy himself used to do, chatting with some miscreant student in his office at school. Back when he still had an office. Back when he still had a school. “Death, principally.”

  “You’re saying death is one of the side effects?”

  “No, I’m saying death is the principal side effect.”

  “And if I don’t get the shot—”

  “That’s entirely your call.”

  “If I don’t get the shot, and I wind up contracting yellow fever over there after all—what are the side effects of that?”

  “Death, principally,” said that smug and mordant internist. He was beginning to really enjoy himself, no question.

  “No others?”

  To which Wainwright, his patience now exhausted, said, “How many others do you need?”

  Nonetheless, if it was possible to feel nauseated and apprehensive and borderline malarial in a good way, that was Teddy’s condition at this moment, hurtling toward the Horn of Africa in a cramped, juddering box. It was more or less how he’d felt in the back of the police cruiser last summer, being carted off to jail in the middle of the night. All messy and new. A raw, bloody hatchling peering through the shards of his shell. At least this time he wasn’t going to be locked up when he arrived, he thought. Whether he’d be locked up when he returned was of course another story, a story he preferred not to read.

  Meanwhile the seat-belt light had now chimed on. The engines were slowing, the plane banking into a slow, languid turn. His seatmate gathered her books together and stowed them into her carry-on bag. Then she took one last sip of her bottled water and screwed the lid shut.

  Light came blasting off the wings. Below, unfolding like a carpet, lay the crescent coastline of Alexandria.

  They circled over the bleached sprawl of the city. Tall minarets, spindly and lean, shimmered in the heat. There were fine hotels, citadels, and palaces with enormous garden
s. Canals snaked out from the city center, writhing toward the outlying terraces of the suburbs, which were wrapped in a haze of dust. The Mediterranean was slipping away behind them, falling back into the clouds. Europe and all its artifices were fading fast, a dream they’d woken from and forgotten.

  Beyond the last houses, the land looked parched, uninhabitable. Dust devils whirled across the hills. The saline in the soil glittered like frost.

  He recalled a line from Burton: the sand softer than a bed of down. Well, it didn’t look soft from up here. But fortunately he didn’t want softness. He wanted things hard. And now he would get them. Once he crossed into the interior he’d be on his own, like any other nomad—wandering and exposed, looking for signs. The sands like a blank page unfurled below. You could make all the marks on it you wanted, he thought. Soon they too would be erased.

  Now they were descending in earnest. Hydraulics groaned in the plane’s big belly. People were pushing up their tray tables, stowing away their trash. The seats shuddered and bucked. Teddy gripped the armrests. His seatmate closed her eyes. “Now this part I can do without,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “It’s good we met. I will pray for you. That you have a good and productive journey.”

  “Oh, you needn’t bother,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll go fine.”

  “I am sure too. But prayer you see is never a bother.”

  Some low, ringing note in her voice made Teddy examine her more closely. Then he saw it. The silver cross dangling at her neck, on its slim, immaculate thread.

  I’ll be damned, he thought.

  The plane went on lowering itself through the clouds. Dutifully the runway, a good host, rose up to greet them, to extend its smooth and welcoming services. Palm leaves fluttered in the wind. The ground sat baking in the sun, hot and red like the inside of a kiln. He watched his life scud by in wisps like so much exhaust. Soon they were right in the thick of it, and nothing could be seen through the white glare of the window, at least nothing he could name.

  It was true his plans had been conceived in a great rush; many crucial details remained unresolved. For instance, after that one brief, bewildering phone call, he’d never heard back from Danielle. Whether she’d received his e-mails telling her of his plans, whether she’d be waiting for him at the airport, whether she’d be happy to see him, he had no way of knowing. And now it was too late: he was coming anyway.

  He wasn’t going to apologize either. Did a lion, tromping through the bush to retrieve a missing cub, apologize? No, you heard a cry in the darkness and you went to it at once. That was the natural order of things. How a family—a species—endured. He looked around at his fellow passengers. The handsome and good-humored Egyptians with their shiny complexions, the slender, almond-eyed Ethiopians. Surely their children would be waiting for them at the airport. Surely their children understood that when you’ve been in the air a long time, all you wanted was to be greeted at the gate by a loved one who was glad to see you, to absolve you of your weariness and worry. Even if you went on to fight with them a lot later, which you inevitably would.

  Danielle, God knew, was no stranger to fighting. She was fierce and taut, high-pitched as an E-string; no feats of shrillness or antagonism were beyond her. Where fighting was concerned, genetics had doubly blessed her, with her mother’s rhetorical skill and her father’s gross and blundering need.

  So there would be plenty of fighting. Fortunately Teddy didn’t mind fighting. He didn’t even mind losing. It was the intensity he relished, not the winning. Just letting fly.

  Well, he was flying now. He had both seats to himself: his seatmate had deplaned in Alexandria, having put together a little medical kit for him before she left, a Baggie stuffed with cipro tablets, multivitamins, and tiny sachets of antibacterial hand soap. Maybe when you’re born-again or whatever she was, you no longer required so much in the way of protection yourself. She’d said a quick, impersonal good-bye, and marched off down the aisle in her plain flat shoes, her suitcase rattling behind her on its tiny wheels like a compliant pet. Then she disappeared through the hatch, off to another ruined quadrant of the world.

  Teddy looked down at the Nile, a ribbon of blue in its brilliant emerald-green basin—the river of destiny, the Egyptians called it—wending its way through the silted ocher of the Sudan. In Khartoum the great river split in two: the White Nile, gray as nonfat milk, forking south to Uganda, while the Blue Nile, which was in fact blue, bent east toward the Horn. But wait, he thought: that had to be wrong. The Nile tributaries didn’t split in Khartoum, but merged there, became one, and flowed toward the sea.

  All the great explorers, Burton and Speke, Stanley and Baker and Grant, had documented this. They’d come ashore in Zanzibar and tracked the river north, following its hidden sources, the inland seas and underground reservoirs where it fed and steeped. He was all turned around, upside down. He couldn’t follow in their footsteps: he could only parody them, reverse them. Well, maybe reversal for some people was a kind of progress, he thought.

  Anyway what did it matter? The paths had all been laid. The maps were long since full; no new worlds to explore. There are guides everywhere now. He had come too late. The age of imperial expansion was over. Now downgrades and deflations were in effect. What had once been a grand, heroic vocation was now a mere vacation, a holiday package wrapped with a bow. Duty-free. All those small, expensive comforts for sale at the airport—the headphones, the neck-rests, the portable game players, the downloadable language discs. Yes, they knew how to package the exotic these days, how to make it circumscribed and safe for people like him. And doubtless there were a lot of such people.

  He reached for another Tums and cracked it hard between his jaws. Who was he kidding? He was no demonic romantic hero, no Richard Burton or T. E. Lawrence. He was only another amateur, chubby, middle-aged escapist with a camera around his neck and a virtual ticket.

  The light was waning in the windows, the jet banking its way east now, over thorny stubbled mountains and highland plateaus. Not a soul in sight. He could feel the Horn out there like a magnet, drawing him forward by invisible current. Or was it backward? Back to the cradle, the primordial rift. The ancestral home.

  Danielle was down there somewhere too. A child who’d chosen to get lost.

  He rubbed his eyes. Calcified particles of sleep-stuff flaked out from the corners. How many hours had he been flying? It had begun to feel like one long, biblical day. He looked down at the hands of his watch, revolving in random circles. Useless. He took the thing off and stuck it deep in his pocket with his cell phone and keys and American coins, all those useless personal items he’d need to stash away when he arrived.

  “Daddy, you’re here! My God…”

  Tears sprang into Teddy’s eyes. All at once, with the familiar mass and musk of his daughter against him (her face burrowed in his chest, her hair, thick and unruly and rust-colored like his, tickling his neck), his exhaustion fled, the clenched fist in his stomach relaxed its grip. The whole trip was redeemed. Certified in advance. He clutched her close, inhaling the clean damp scent of her scalp, like some distilled essence of being. His entire life as a father of children clicked snugly into place and whirred away at the center of his chest like a pacemaker. Daddy’s here. My God.

  Oh, you weren’t supposed to have favorites, he knew that, but of course everyone did, and this one (he’d never admitted it to himself until this moment; possibly it had never been true until this moment) was his. With this one everything came easy. This one was the outgoer, the live wire, the girl whose moods could be read on her face, who did not require a licensed psychotherapist or a Turing machine to decode. Unlike Mimi, she seemed to recognize and approve of him naturally. She had got to him first, known him when he was less uptight, less constrained—she’d adopted what was best in him and let the rest go. He could feel her bones thudding softly against him through the damp, sticky place where their shirts conjoined. Her arms were leaner than he re
membered, tougher, more sinewy. Her time abroad for all its mysteries and deferrals had solidified her, rendered down the last of her baby fat. Now she was that most formidable creature, a grown woman. So he held on tight.

  Every man who embraces a woman becomes Adam, trembling with gratitude that he’s no longer alone. That was how Teddy felt now. Like an exiled king reclaiming his throne. It was a moment to savor, all right. A moment to deposit in the memory bank against future withdrawals. Because really, how long could it last? Love for parents was a raging stream; for children there were dams and pools, and slippery stones, and little frothy resentments that piled up along the banks. Already she was beginning to squirm, take the first halting steps in an away-from-Dad direction. Soon she would break his hold. Soon like all fathers he’d be forced to let go.

  “Hey, you’re not crying, are you?” She pulled back to get a better look. “Your eyes look a little funny.”

  “It must be the lights.”

  “Bright, aren’t they? They just redid the terminal. It used to be pretty dreary here they tell me.” Above their heads, across the vaulted ceiling, the white girders gleamed. It was an impressive structure, much airier and more modern than he’d expected. He felt obscurely disappointed. “They’ve been sprucing up the place, you know. For the millennium celebration.”

  “The millennium? But that was over a long time ago.”

  “It’s a different calendar here,” she said. “Technically they’re seven years behind us.”

  “Ah.”

  Other passengers were surging up behind them, red-eyed and intent, getting on with the arrival business as in any old airport. Unlike any old airport however the duty-free shop was empty, the currency-exchange dark, and there were no benches or chairs arranged in companionable clusters for an overweight, travel-weary person with a frayed meniscus to rest. Just as well: the brigade of lean, smooth-faced boy-soldiers smoking and smirking behind the Passport Control desk did not look tolerant of loiterers. Automatic rifles were slung casually at their hips. AK-47s? AK-48s? For all he knew they were Uzis. Well, they had their battles to fight, he supposed, and he had his. A cry had sounded in the darkness. The lion in winter was padding out on his big soft paws, in search of his pride.