Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  Oh, he’d been wary at first, quiet and evasive and irresolute in the sack. But now all that had changed. He was no longer a spectator. He was an accomplished adulterer. A gambler at the big-stakes table. All-in.

  “So who do you fantasize about now?” Gail had asked him that morning, in her blunt, not-so-good-at-teasing way.

  “What makes you think I’ve stopped fantasizing about you?”

  “It’s obvious. People only fantasize about what isn’t there.” She shook her hair out a little; the curls straightened a moment, then snapped back into place. “And I, as you may have noticed, am here.”

  “You’re saying that married people never fantasize about their spouses?”

  “Oh, married people…” Her voice trailed off, her eyes gone gelid in their dark pouches. Why had he brought that up?

  “I’m not all that interested in fantasies at the moment,” he said. “I’ve had a bellyful. I was starting to worry I’d turn into one of those guys who lives alone with a lot of cats and has all these weird trivial fetishes, like your cousin Don. I like reality better now. I’m starting to think it agrees with me.”

  Gail smiled placidly but said nothing.

  “I’d like to think it agrees with you too,” he said.

  Again she said nothing. Her jaw was set but her eyes wandered. Was she leaving him already? Plunging back into her own private natatorium? This middle-aged, provincial woman with the messy briefcase and unshaved legs, who’d been out of the country, other than weekend trips to Montreal, all of twice, who’d slept with all of three men in her life, who had no evident or quantifiable sense of humor, who remained either hostile or indifferent to virtually every cultural icon (Dylan, Beckett, Preston Sturges, the Clash) he held dear…what was the source of her power over him? How had she reduced him, in a few short months, to this sack of formless putty, waiting only to be taken in her mouth and breathed into life, into definition? The whole thing was unfathomable. He might as well be standing at the ocean, trying to fathom that. He remembered a line from Nietzsche, how in every couple one person looks out the window, and the other looks in. It was the kind of profound insight only a brilliant, syphilitic madman could come up with. And in Oren’s case it was true. Typically he began as the one looking out, then somehow by the end wound up the other. He supposed something was wrong with his way of looking out, however, some excess or deficit that incited the women in his life to want to look out themselves. It was very disheartening.

  At the same time it was also very heartening, he thought, to have it matter so much to him who was looking where. So he tried to stay positive on the new-relationship front. Tried not to begrudge Gail her other activities and obligations. Tried not to fret when she was late for a rendezvous, not to pout when she canceled, not to seize on every wistful sigh, truncated phone call, or less than spectacular orgasm like a prosecutor gathering an indictment. What did he expect? He’d got himself involved with a lawyer, a mother, a married woman. No one had imposed these burdens on him; he’d taken them on himself. Deliberately, methodically. And if he’d overshot the target somewhat, if in his panic to nail down some of the looming intangibles of his youth, the job and the house and the woman, the things that rooted you in place, he’d skipped over the best part of his adulthood, gone directly from a (protracted) late adolescence to a (premature) middle age without ever passing Go; if he now discovered himself to be boxed in and trapped at the center of the board, the Chance cards gone, no Get Out of Jail Free, in a game he could already imagine growing tired of someday—well, that was the deal he’d signed up for, and he would accept it and submit to it, as prematurely middle-aged people do. Yes, looking at him now, you’d have almost thought he was growing up, or going mad, or whatever it was you called it when you began deliberately and methodically to cause yourself pain.

  12

  The Egg, Walking

  “What time do you have?” Teddy asked. He shaded his eyes, trying to gauge the sun’s position, its temporary arrest, its slow-motion decline. His watch had long since given up the ghost. Without it, the heat, the cloudless sky, the sight of his own big, doughy hand in front of his face, puffy and ridged like a pastry—it all left him feeling a bit alien, unmoored.

  “Four fifteen,” said Dr. Dave.

  “We’re not going to make it tonight, are we?”

  “It’s the hot season. Radiators get cranky when they’re hot, just like us.”

  “What about the train?”

  “Last time I took the Djibouti line,” the doctor said, “it broke down before we left the station. They wouldn’t let us off. The lights weren’t working, the windows were wedged shut. Some of the women fainted. They had to be taken off on stretchers.”

  “Big deal,” Teddy said. “You’re talking to an Amtrak rider. We’re used to that sort of thing.”

  “There were some Somali soldiers on board on their way back from leave. They’d been drinking all day. They held a pissing competition in the aisle that got fairly heated. Then they started in hassling the passengers.” He scratched at the label on his beer bottle with the tip of his thumb. “Naturally, being soldiers, they were drawn to the women first. They had a whole routine they’d worked out. First they’d ask for a cigarette. Then they’d ask for a light. Then, if the girl was especially pretty, they’d ask f—”

  “Okay, okay. The train’s out.”

  “That line’s been discontinued anyway.” The doctor took a sip of his Castel. “Cutbacks.” He leaned back on his stool, his fingers laced behind the back of his faded Dartmouth baseball cap, his legs outstretched, like an accountant on his lunch hour. He was a short, stoop-shouldered man in a polo shirt and running shoes. Behind the zealous magnifications of his glasses his blue eyes had a hard, particulate shine. If his temperament were a mineral it would have been quartz.

  Teddy had liked him right off. They’d been traveling together for three days now, through the dry plains east and north of Addis, visiting clinics in small villages, delivering medicines. It had been Danielle’s idea, and a good one, that he tag along. “You wanted to see the Danakil, right? Like this guy Thesiger you told me about? Okay, here’s your chance.” She had her back to him as she spoke; nonetheless he could read in the tight line of her shoulders how eager she was to be rid of him already. And why? He’d only just arrived.

  Still, she’d been right. It was an opportunity like no other. And after a week in filthy, teeming Addis, it felt good to be out on the road again, a free agent, exploring unknown provinces. And he liked David Fleming, this brisk, intense, no-nonsense little doctor, this renegade Catholic with his choppy haircut and tube socks. The man had energy. Even idle, he jiggled his knees below his chair, fanning his thighs. Like most men of science he assumed he knew more about the things you were curious about than you did about the things he was curious about. Generally this proved true. He had come to East Africa after med school to do research in tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, while he considered which of the dozen top-tier residencies he’d been offered up and down the Eastern seaboard appealed to him. East Africa turned out to be something of a gold mine for infectious diseases. Of course it was generously endowed with noninfectious diseases as well. Diseases as a rule tended to flourish over here in East Africa. And so, it seemed, did Dr. Dave. Now he had an Ethiopian wife, five adopted children, research and consulting gigs from Cairo to Nairobi, and all the infectious diseases you could ever want. Three days a week care packages arrived via FedEx, chemo drugs and retrovirals from Brussels or Houston or Johannesburg. Just to keep track of what came in seemed an enormous task. And what went out—the X-rays, the blood samples, the digital photos of monstrous deformities—that too. Yet here he sat, marooned on the dreary outskirts of Dire Dawa, drinking Castels in the heat of the afternoon and shooting the shit with Teddy Hastings, fugitive and child pornographer at large.

  “I don’t get it,” Teddy said. “How do you get anything done in these dysfunctional conditions? It would drive me nuts.�
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  “You wouldn’t be the first,” Dave said. “White people have been going crazy in Africa for centuries. It’s part of the attraction.”

  “I don’t see any attraction.”

  “You will. You just have to unlearn some stuff first. At bottom you see we’re a very primitive, superstitious race.”

  “Us?”

  “Take this idea of ours that things should go on working the way they’re supposed to. If the electric is on today, we think, it will come on tomorrow too. If the mail arrives in the afternoon today, it will come tomorrow around the same time.”

  “What’s superstitious about that?”

  “Well, it’s not very realistic, is it? It’s just blind faith in some higher power grid we can’t see. Africans are more modern. They don’t expect to have everything under control all the time. They don’t even want to. So the idea of losing that control doesn’t paralyze them like it does us.”

  “Maybe if it did,” Teddy said, “they’d work harder to keep it.”

  “Maybe.” The doctor nodded pleasantly, but his voice turned a degree or two colder. “Or maybe neither of us are in any position to lecture these people about how hard they should work.”

  “Okay, don’t get all huffy. We’re just talking.”

  “One thing you learn right away, practicing medicine here. Don’t be a stickler. You go for home runs, you’ll strike out every time. The thing is to make contact. Remember: the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

  “We say that at the middle school too. On the other hand, the bad is the enemy of the good too, no? Like that van of yours—what a piece of crap. I thought you people here all drove around in Land Rovers.”

  “You people?”

  “You know what I mean,” Teddy said. “Every soccer mom in New England goes zipping off to the mall in one of those big off-road safari vehicles. So why are you poking along in that rattletrap clunker is the question.”

  Dr. Dave looked down at his running shoes and shrugged philosophically, his eyes hidden below his cap’s peaked visor. “It hasn’t been a priority. I’m not that well funded.”

  “Well, we’ll have to do something about that,” Teddy said.

  “We?”

  “Somebody.” Flies were buzzing his arm like some weedy, overgrown airstrip. He tried to wave them away. “You want to get this school of yours up and running? You need somebody writing grants. Somebody doing assessments, evaluation. Tech support. Building and maintenance. Educational consultants.”

  “Yes, that would all be very useful, I’m sure.”

  “Useful? Try the raw minimum. Day one.” God, he missed it, being a principal, a main man. Sitting in his big leather chair with a mug of fresh coffee and an oversize muffin, bossing people around. “You have to go about these things professionally. Time is at a premium. You’re an expert in your field. What sense does it make, humping all this valuable medicine around, hundreds of people dependent on you, and you lose a whole day to something as trivial as a blown radiator? That’s just wrong.”

  The doctor gave a gnomic smile. “Who’s to say what’s trivial? The older I get, the less I can tell the difference.”

  Here we go, Teddy thought: another Buddhist. The harder you pushed the guy to admit to a recognizable emotion—boredom, frustration, rage—the more he receded into the shade of his own private serenity garden. Some people were like that under stress: they shut down. Teddy as it happened was the opposite. Stress opened him up. Pricked by thorns, he blossomed like a cactus flower.

  But you could only open up for so long. And by now they’d been marooned here for two and a half hours, waiting for the van to be attended to at the ARCO service garage across the street. It was the only car in the place. Yet, for all the spirited commentary it had inspired among the three lean-faced young mechanics—the tutting laments, the vigorous philosophical forays into diagnostic theory—no one had showed much interest in actually dirtying their hands and dealing with the thing. That was an oral culture for you, Teddy thought. Every decision collectively discussed. Like that other feckless and intransigent tribe, the Carthage Union School Board. He was ready at this point to roll up his sleeves and dive under the hood himself. But the inner workings of the motor were strange to him. Anyway it was too hot to be outside.

  It was too hot to be inside too, of course, but here he was. The air was stifling. Flies clustered congenially in the ashtrays. The sluggish, rocking revolutions of the ceiling fan did nothing to dislodge them; the cure seemed worse than the disease. Half the blades were missing, the others waved rhetorically at the walls, generating their own hot air, like politicians in a motorcade. Reddish dust flew in through the windows and settled over the tables like a benediction.

  They drank some more Castels. As cheap, flat, tepid beer went, it wasn’t bad. Teddy had stopped drinking beer after that disastrous night at the Lyons’ Den; only now did he remember why. He yawned mightily and scratched his many bug bites. High up on the wall-mounted television, King Kong—not the original but the remake, and a low-quality bootleg at that—was suffering the torments of all wild things, being chased around by white people smaller and less powerful than himself.

  Teddy’s heart gave a squeeze, shuddered in its shell. A dense liquid sensation ran through his chest like a yoke. Sorry, friend, he thought, the world’s a bad movie, endlessly remade; there’s no getting free. You fled your native state with the highest of hopes, only to find the things you’d left behind you had run on ahead, were already there waiting when you arrived. He thought of all the used goods he’d seen peddled on the sidewalks of Addis—the cast-off hardware and corrupted software, the tattered jeans, the old T-shirts with runic, fading logos. Africa was where old things wound up when they lost their shape and sheen. One last go-round before they wore out completely.

  How lamentable, Teddy thought. To have come so far only to be encased in the same old shit.

  Dr. Dave was thumbing through a newspaper someone had left behind. It did not look too current.

  “So what’s the news?”

  “Nothing too exciting. Government crackdowns. Borders on alert. Temporary shortages.”

  “Crackdowns on what? On alert for what? Shortages of what?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “Well, pass me the sports section, will you? I want to check the standings.”

  “You’re welcome to try. Keep in mind they’re in Amharic.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Teddy said. “Numbers are the same in any language.”

  They drank another couple of beers each, passing the sections of the newspaper back and forth in silence, like a suburban couple on a Sunday afternoon. Outside the sun sank toward the foothills. Teddy’s stomach was rumbling again, secreting dull, miasmic vapors and gases. He was down to his last roll of Tums. Between the heat and the beer and the spicy foods they’d been eating, the rubbery, gray injera, the desiccated chicken parts and puddly sheens of clarified butter, he’d been tossing down the antacids like M&M’s. He’d enjoyed the food as he ate it of course, but now his inner organs felt crowded, the grease lay on his lips like a clown mask. He sat there belching softly, poring over scores he didn’t understand for games he hadn’t seen. A small expeditionary guerrilla force of biting insects traipsed through the jungle of his chest hair, hacking a path to his navel. His lids drooped. His neck itched. Below his wrinkled khakis his boxers scratched at his balls; the fabric, saggy and stretched, had long since soaked through. “I think I’m kind of starting to like this place,” he said.

  “Shh. Listen.”

  “What?”

  “The kids. They’re singing. Can you hear them?”

  “Now that you mention it, yeah.”

  High, piping voices floated up from the riverbed, where white-shawled children picked their way barefoot along the banks, herding goats. The doctor scratched one cheek with the backs of his fingers, his eyes tender. “Look, I’m not belittling the problems,” he said, “but if they could just catch a brea
k, they’ve got tremendous resources. Half the population of Africa is under fifteen. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “Yeah. They’re going to need a whole shitload of middle schools.”

  “It means they can solve their own problems, if we just stay out of their way. Look out at those fields. That teff they’re growing? It’s the most nutritious grain in the world. The people want to work. Why are we giving them eight hundred million dollars in aid and almost nothing in agricultural development, nothing in roads and infrastructure? How does that help? The farmers can’t compete with free food: they give up. If we could just level the playing field a little, let them compete equably for a change in the world market—think what they could do here.”

  The doctor spoke of Africa, Teddy reflected, as if it were some chronically underperforming, small-market baseball team; if you kicked out the old management and built up the farm system, everything would be fine. But maybe he was right. Teddy for his part was ready for a nap. A rift yawned open in his mind, between where he was and his understanding of the forces that had led him here. Some part of him had already detached itself and gone running on ahead to Harar—Harar, the ancient gateway to the east, where he and the doctor, if the gods of ARCO permitted, would arrive tomorrow. He tried to focus on that, on what lay ahead, beyond the arching doorway—the round, thatched-roof huts, the thorn trees silhouetted against the sky, the camels trudging through the haze, silent as an apparition, bearing sacks of salt from the brown hills of Somalia.

  “Christ,” he blurted, “it is beautiful here, isn’t it?”

  The doctor paused; he looked almost angry. Apparently he’d still been talking all this time.

  “It’s beautiful,” he agreed, “and it hurts.”