‘That’s correct, but you know what I did, I didn’t create a group on Facebook, I just added everyone so we can vote for which missions to visit, and now I’m seeing, like, everyone’s information, their strange friends.’
‘Oh man, I have to tell you what happened to me in the grocery store yesterday!’
‘Wait, wait, wait – I need to finish telling you about this photo I saw on Facebook. So I was looking through some random person’s vacation album from Fiji, some friend of a friend – it’s strange you can see all that! Anyway this woman had all these photos she’d taken of little Fijian kids, like a hundred pictures.’
‘Why, she a teacher?’
‘I don’t know, I felt bad, you know – looking through someone else’s personal information, so I was about to close it, but then I looked at the album’s title: it was called scrummy chocolate children.’
‘Scrummy?’
‘It means delicious.’
‘Oh no man, like cannibalism!’
‘No, it was all well intentioned, all these comments with emoji hearts and stuff. I was just thinking, brother, imagine if I went around New York taking photos of white babies and posting them on Facebook and writing Tasty vanilla ice-cream babies! Cute cow-milk babies!’
‘Fresh-baked white-flour children! Oh man, that’s crazy, please don’t do that, brother!’
‘Imagine! I’d be arrested.’ We were rolling on our beds, laughing, our faces pixelating across the screens.
‘Idriss, listen to this, so in the grocery store yesterday – we had this graduation event for the university, anyway we all had stuff to get from the stores, I had to pick up sodas and stuff. I got the sodas the other day and then in the afternoon I was like I should get some bottled water, sparkling and flat, et cetera. So I’m carrying these big five-litre bottles of water and standing, waiting in the line for the lady at the cashier. This old German woman approaches me and says sir, you don’t need to buy water here, it’s not like Africa, we have a lot of clean water here – and she was one hundred per cent just trying to be helpful.’
‘Oh my GOD!’
‘People are strange.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Anyway, little brother, I have to go to sleep now, email me more news.’
‘Will do, have you spoken to Mum?’
‘Yes, she’s very well, but they had to close down the Abuja factory.’
‘Oh?’
‘Listen, let’s talk on email, I must get to sleep.’
‘Bye, brother.’
‘We’ll talk soon.’
The factory in Abuja was on its way to closing years ago, but the news still stung, it would have still stung my mother. The Elephant Flour Mill had produced flour for four decades; our mother started as a distributor and then sold the distribution to work at the company when we were in primary school. She eventually bought it. She was always a businesswoman: before the Elephant Flour Mill, when she became a widow, she took over the town’s main stationery store, Greetings Stationery. I remembered the plastic flowers always for sale, the newspapers, racks of birthday cards, and strings of candies, Milo sachets and decorations hanging from pegs at the ceiling. Abdullah and I helped in the store every day after school and our mum really pushed us to think about money, think about money coming in, about making more of it – it was little wonder my brother and I both studied finance. I was going to make my mother proud, make lots of money, big money, genuine Rolex watch money.
Last Night
Everything had likely gone wrong. I think I was experiencing a fugue state, that thing where you can’t remember who you are and you become someone else. I felt that I couldn’t work out why I changed so quick or to what. I couldn’t even remember how I got to be there, and for which reason, if there were one. The metal trays of the police van were cold; maybe there were three more people in there, I couldn’t see straight. I’d lost my friends during the night. The whiskey had changed the wiring of my brain; it was nothing like drinking palm wine tapped directly from a fallen tree, strong but measured. I missed the sweet taste of it then, the hot days, hacking pawpaw down with machete – our lives agreeable. New York was difficult and now I was on my way to being arrested. I knew I couldn’t get arrested, a black guy on a tourist visa, with vague hopes and dreams in my head still. I asked the officer if I could please use the toilet. He ignored me. I asked another, he denied my request, and then I said that I had a medical condition, but they both threatened me. I couldn’t think of any way to get out so I just made a quick decision: clamping down, hanging my head and urinating in my pressed trousers, hoping I could pee enough to make enough mess and confusion and disgust. The officer grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and threw me out of the truck; I began to weep on cue, half out of real shame, and half for the drama. I was waiting for the bite of a taser, for the whoop of a baton against bones. But the officer, he just told me to get the fuck away and so I ran and ran for as long as I could, crying and running until I found the 6-train station and rode back to my apartment on 116th. New York was over; that was the moment I knew it.
The day had started out better. We’d finished up the last mission visit, we’d met with the IMF twice, Canada, China, Russia, Bangladesh, Bosnia, forty-seven missions in total. It had been a successful season to sit down with that many missions over the last ninety days. Some interns had been more agitated than others, especially the friends I’d made – Samira, whose parents were from Morocco and whose aunt ran a textiles company there, demanded information on what the garment industry in Bangladesh was doing to support female workers in detrimental conditions; Laura from Norway told the Canadian officials that the exploitation of their Native people was disgraceful, as she put it. Everyone had a point to raise and none of the interns ever embarrassed me; instead, I was captivated by how much they truly cared. When we visited the Nigerian mission, in the beginning I’d been hoping to shake a lot of hands and make a business-like impression, talk about booming industry, but then Promise, an intern from a Guyana clan, wanted to talk about the electricity problems in rural areas, security measures for UN workers after the Abuja bombing, and the complicity of the government in all this. I was embarrassed then, I thought she was doing that classic thing of conflating all these issues into the corruption of the government and I almost told her to shush about my country, but then I thought about all the days we’d spent chasing down diesel for generators and how that was all related to disenfranchisement, and thought that she did have a point, or that I was at least going to let her finish her idea.
Our last visit was to the Iran mission; the delegates spread out posters of Persepolis and desert plains and tourists on bicycles perched at the edge of plateaus. They looked like dated photographs, maybe a decade or two old. My friend Emad, the Egyptian dude who seemed to make all the female interns swoon, turned the poster to face us, looked at me with a little smile, as if to say, I don’t think tourists are riding their bicycles around anymore. The mission representatives were kind, they provided cans of Coca-Cola instead of a boiler of coffee and told us about all the wonderful aspects of Iran’s history, before it had been bound into a so-called axis of evil. They had hardcover books of Persian poetry, covered in burgundy leather and gold embossing, and handed those out too. It was our last day, and I was glad Iran preferred to talk poetry and tourism instead of human rights or nuclear anything. I was strung out after three months; I didn’t think it then, or maybe didn’t want to believe it. But it had been grinding me down, the constant, endless barrage of injustices that required my attention, yet feeling – as we all did as interns – utterly hopeless to do anything. When I first arrived I thought the permanent staff were all weak, vapid paper pushers, and some were, but mostly I admired them in their relentless, thankless jobs.
I looked around at our small group of committee members. Most had become friends, and they all knew what they were doing after thei
r internship, or at least most did. I looked at the blank screen of my phone, no messages. Raphaëlle, the beautiful young French woman, she got another internship in the Envoy on Youth; Fatima, another beautiful young woman, was going back to Pakistan to complete her master’s; Rongrong Ma, also a beautiful young woman (I think the interns were all beautiful to me), was going to work for a Chinese development company in Kenya, they were buying everything there; Emad would stay on in Development Goals at the Secretariat. I still didn’t have a message on my phone; I didn’t have an offer to go anywhere after that day. Francesco was there with us, but he wasn’t my friend anymore, I didn’t think. We seemed different now. He was always leaving the offices to have meetings; I knew he’d got in with IMF behind my back, or right in front of my face. Francesco was sickly handsome, he looked like he’d be a watch model in magazines even when he was seventy years old. He made friends with some actor too, from a show called Entourage; I’d never seen it though. They had their own entourage, those rich kids from the European private schools. They were the ones running the Social Committee. Did we all hate them? I think I hated them the most. It started innocently early on, they’d organised drinks at TGI Fridays; everyone came along. But then they organised Noodle Night at some place in the East Village; I messaged some friends the menu and prices I found online. No-one went except the clique. They were in Arms, Security and Finance – where I’d wanted to be in the beginning.
After the Iran visit we’d all gone back to our offices for departure interviews and to pack up our partitioned cubicles. My supervisor wasn’t in the office, but had left a note to say she would email me a recommendation letter and wished me good luck. I went home to freshen up and to drop my bag of textbooks and folders and (now useless) paperwork at the apartment before the last soiree at the bar at Trump Towers, a place I hadn’t checked the prices of at that time, but they had later sent me into a despair that I couldn’t quite explain. I know I’d arrived and immediately tried to drink myself to some other place. It’d worked in a way. Before I went to the party I ate at Chuck E. Cheese’s uptown. There was a black woman there with a white baby, maybe the child was five years old, they were sitting just near me, eating and laughing. Then the woman’s phone rang and she put her finger against her lips as if to say shhh and she said, ‘Nothing to your mother about being in Chuck E. Cheese’s, okay?’ The girl had nodded in agreement. It reminded me of when my brother and I were students in school and the white teacher who was teaching there one semester had taken a bunch of kids in the school van on our last day; she’d driven us all to a fast-food place, the only one in the closest city, it was called Sweet Sensations and had internet for rent there too. I remember she said we could order whatever we liked and we and all the kids from the tin houses ordered half fried chickens and chips. The teacher ordered containers of ice-cream too and brought plastic spoons over to the table. I remember all the kids sat there not eating their food, just keeping their chickens in the flimsy plastic bags, watching the steam trapped inside, the ice-cream turning to liquid. The teacher couldn’t understand, she kept saying eat, eat, she even said it in Hausa and Igbo as if it would make a difference. My brother and I ate our food; we didn’t need to save it. But the teacher just couldn’t understand why these kids didn’t eat their treats. She dropped us all home afterward, and I sat up front in the bus and explained to her, after the tin hut kids got out, that it was normal – those kids are not going to eat like that without sharing it with their family. She felt like an idiot, I guess. Then she asked us why we ate, and I said she couldn’t tell the difference because we were all in the same school uniform, but our mother ran a stationery business and we were comfortable; I thanked her for the treat in any case. When I got out I said, ‘Don’t you know those kids probably haven’t had meat for months?’ Which made her sad, I think, because her face went all red. I’d felt a bit like that teacher when we were at the UN – like we were all just handing out half fried chickens to random people and not really understanding where it should all go, or who needed to share it and who didn’t. It wasn’t entirely bad, the work was in good faith, but sometimes I felt like the problems were just too big to understand completely.
I called my brother after I washed my slacks in the basin; I was so relieved when I unlocked the front door and Pedro wasn’t there. The Skype screen pulsated and opened up to his voice.
‘Idriss?’
‘Abdullah?’
‘What’s wrong?’ He could hear the residue of panic.
‘Oww, I think I’m ready to go back to Abuja …’
‘What happened? Why are you changing your mind about America?’
‘I got in a fight tonight, almost arrested. It’s not safe for me here.’
‘Oh God, what happened?’
‘I can’t really remember, I drank liquor, whiskey. I was in a wealthy place and just felt suffocated. Like, I was watching all the interns drinking and laughing and touching each other. Laughing after everything we know – all the shit in the world – and they were just drinking and laughing …’
‘Idriss, you know the world is not for weak stomachs; you just have to climb above it. Be on the right side.’
‘I don’t know if I believe it anymore, that I’ll get to work at Goldman or if I have the mind for it. What do I do?’
‘You were always like this, Idriss, you were always giving away your lunch biscuits – you don’t remember what you were like?’
‘What was I like?’
‘You never had toys, remember? Because you dashed them to the other kids, all of them! Ha, our mother ordered in GI Joes, we had trucks, Lego even! Where are Idriss’s new toys a week later? Out in the dirt with all the district kids! You were too funny, Idriss!’
‘I didn’t do that!’
‘You did!’
‘Poor Mother paying for toys to be given away.’
‘No, don’t look at it like that. I think she just worried about you in the world – not being tough enough for the world.’
‘I’m tough enough, I just can’t get a business internship, I can’t find one!’
‘I think you know why, brother; I think you know why you went to the United Nations and not over here to Europe, where you could have come to school with me. Don’t you think you can’t cut your coat to make it fit?’
‘It fits!’
Abdullah rubbed his lips then with his forefinger, raised his eyebrows at me, looking into the camera. He didn’t say anything, just waited for me to realise. Waited for everything to sink in. Finally he asked, ‘What do you think it was that upset you so much at this party?’
‘The cost of the drinks!’
‘No, it wasn’t that. Tell me?’
‘How everyone was dancing, laughing, the music?’ I didn’t know what I was meant to say.
‘I think it was hypocrisy, no?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I mean your hypocrisy, not theirs – no-one makes you upset but yourself. Look, ring tomorrow after a sleep, ring me after you eat breakfast and take a walk and enjoy the city. It’s New York! You’re in New York, Idriss!’
‘New York is the problem!’ I yelled a little then, frustrated.
‘New Idriss is the problem! New Idriss, who might just be old Idriss! There are plenty other paths to follow in America, not just money.’
‘Maybe.’ I felt deflated.
‘Haven’t you heard that song on all the radios lately, Idriss?’ Abdullah broke into song. ‘ “Empire State of Mind” – you heard it?’
I had, it was playing in the bar earlier. He kept singing the chorus over and over, dancing, trying to get me to laugh. It worked.
‘Call me tomorrow, little brother,’ he said, and as he hung up he was still dancing with his upper body to the song in our heads.
I went to the kitchen to take some milk before bed, or was I supposed to drink the milk before I went drinking al
cohol? I couldn’t remember; in any case, I shook the carton and there was only enough for Pedro’s cereal in the morning. I took a glass of water. I’d think about what to do tomorrow.
Baby Island
Guangzhou that September was thirty-six degrees Celsius, thick with humidity. It was a pleasure to arrive in my room, to escape the scent of diesel, camphor burning and onions frying, to catch the edge of a cold front pitched from the air-conditioning. I spotted the agenda already on my bed, and rifled through the plastic pouch for the hall layout. Last year in Hong Kong my booth had been in an obscure corner near the exit, nowhere near a Commanding Position and the chi was all off; no paying grandparents would come near me. This year I’d be opposite the entrance – I fist-pumped the air, kicked the bed runner off with my heel, flung my shoes across the room. I took the receiver and pressed the little face with a top hat. ‘Nai hou,’ I said and the desk clerk replied, ‘Yes, madam, may I help you?’ She wouldn’t allow me the chance to try on account of my foreign accent. I was a little rude with her and, in my parents’ worst Cantonese, asked her to bring me some tequila. I put the phone down and vowed not to bother for the rest of the trip.
The schedule was succinct: expo, cocktail event, welcome dinner, then on to Shanghai. I’d never been to Guangzhou before. The university had organised the trip with IDP – even after a decade working with the host company, I still hadn’t an inkling what IDP stood for. I was more or less a travelling saleswoman, selling semesters of overpriced Australian education to the wealthy Chinese, Indian, Scandinavian student populations. I hated my job.
I unpacked my suitcase, hung the skirt suits in the closet, took out and refolded the banners and tablecloths, and arranged the brochures and packets of Tim Tams on the large desk. I drank my tequila quickly and took a shower. I ran both hands down the slate walls in the bathroom. I did love the nice hotel rooms.
I dressed in black and headed to the hotel bar. The barman began to speak to me in Cantonese; I ordered in my thickest Australian English. I missed my parents when I came to Asia. I was an amalgam; the union of my voice and face didn’t sit well with people – but if my parents had been here they could have spoken for me in their retained accents.
After the Carnage Page 5