Whites

by Norman Rush

  He inched himself up into a sitting position and looked down at his sleeping darling. They had been married less than a year. Sometimes she smiled in her sleep. He loved her teeth, small and white, like mints. He had all his teeth, knock wood. Lois was twenty-eight and he was fifty-six. She was his second wife, and she was perfect. Her skin was perfect for Africa—the way she tanned beautifully. She loved Botswana’s dry climate, and in fact that reminded him to remind her to be sensitive about the drought when she was enthusing about the climate in front of people. He loved her all the time. She was grateful for everything. He had saved her from Oregon, she liked to say. She meant the climate and what it had done to her sinuses. She meant her job as a cashier in a hotel restaurant in Medford, where they had met when he was on vacation recuperating from his breakup with Elaine. Lois was unmarried when he met her, because she had been waiting for two key things in one: a man she could respect, who was also someone not fated to live in Oregon forever because of his work or family ties. She thought that his job with the Agency for International Development was wonderful, because it kept him in sunny countries and it helped the poor. She thought of AID as something like the Red Cross. She was a wonderful specimen. She was improving his life in so many ways that he couldn’t keep up with it. His salt intake was down, due to her tricks with lemon juice and so on. Also, he had always thought of hair spray as effeminate and had preferred to duck out and comb his hair nineteen times a day, with water if need be, rather than use it. But then she had shown him that the hair sprays he had tried were too strong and made his hair look like icing, and she had gotten him one that was the right strength and now his hair was fine all day and could be forgotten about. She was a helpmeet: his first. She could be an ad for health food, she looked so well. She could sleep almost at will, it seemed to him. She invariably slept through the dogs. They couldn’t keep her awake. He kept her awake, if he was restless, but not the dogs themselves.

  He lowered one foot to the floor. It was amazing to him how much he wanted to be fit, these days. Of course, anyone with a young wife would want to be fit, to some extent. That was why the thing with the dogs had to be brought to an end. But his attitude toward being in shape was a hundred per cent the reverse of what it had been under Elaine, if that was the right way to put it. His attitude toward jogging was a case in point. Jogging had been invented while his back was turned—while he was in Malawi or Togo, probably. He could remember that the first time he had seen joggers, when he and Elaine had been back in New York on home leave—in an expensive hotel, naturally, on Central Park South—it was already a mass movement. Elaine had been a genius at choosing the most expensive city or country for rest and recreation. If there were two countries, one where the dollar was high and the other where it was really low, there would always be a compelling reason to go where it was most expensive. It had to be France because the springs under the Fontaine de Vaucluse were drying up, or it had to be Italy because the Villa d’Este was closing down its most unique fountains because a tire factory was polluting the water. So, there he had been, looking out the window down into beautiful, green Central Park and seeing joggers everywhere. Now he saw the point of it—he himself was walking everywhere he could—but at the time he had been able to see the joggers only as something interrupting his pleasure in looking at the park, something agitating, something that marred the beauty of the vegetation, like aphids. Lo had information about health. People were amazed when she proved to them that some salt companies were adding sugar, or some form of it, to salt.

  He was up. He felt fragile, because of the dogs. By rights, he should be feeling reborn, almost. He was hardly drinking. There was Lo. He was basically through with smoking. But he felt fragile. Botswana felt dangerous to him. For instance, the floor beneath his feet. The Batswana kept waxing, no matter what was said to them. Lo was too soft. Overwaxing was still going on. At work, the cleaners waxed directly on bare concrete, on stoops, on steps. The floors blazed everywhere. They could kill you. Barefoot was safest. Thongs were dangerous on these floors.

  There was one other thing that not sleeping was making him irrational on: the geyser. He tried not to be. But the hot water for the tub and shower came from a gigantic cylinder bolted to the wall above the bathtub, with electric coils in a collar at its base. It would crush anyone in the tub if it ever came loose from its moorings. And Lo took baths, exclusively. He was always obsessively inspecting the geyser, pulling at the mountings and feeling at the same time that he might be weakening the thing with all his testing. Hot baths were therapy for Lo. The giant tubs the British had established as normal all over Africa were a revelation to her. The shower stall was separate and safe.

  He set the shower to spray just enough to get him rinsed but not enough to bother Lo. He was expert at showering quietly. He was used to the African workday starting when it did—ungodly early. She was still adapting. He liked her to sleep late. Small things about her made him emotional, like lying about her age to make herself older and more appropriate for him when they were courting. That was the kind of thing he loved. Or, recently, when he’d said he felt like Prometheus having his liver torn out every night and regenerating each day so it could be torn out again the next night, and she’d asked who Prometheus was. The hot water directly on his scalp was helping.

  Walking was calming, and Carl liked the half-mile walk from his office to the medical unit. The embassy nurse wanted to see him. He knew he was overdue for his gamma globulin, but there was something more she wanted to discuss. He was going to plead with her for a state-of-the-art sleeping pill. He wouldn’t get it: she was to the right of medically conservative. The regular pills were no help. They would knock him out but not keep him out. Lo’s prescription for him was more exercise, as in jogging. The thought was torture. He was too tired for exercise. In any case, the problem wasn’t falling asleep, it was getting back to sleep once the Minister of Labor’s dogs started their demented crooning and baying and snarling and fighting or mating or tunneling under the fence to come skulking around the house, rifling his trash cans.

  In Gaborone, when he walked, he used the network of dirt paths behind the houses—the “people’s paths.” Africa was humanity walking, or rather Africans walking. Whites rode. He was almost the only white ambulating along with the Batswana. People looked at him. It would be fair to say they stared. They were staring now, a little. He thought, They can’t get over my uncanny resemblance to Samuel Beckett. Immediately, he felt guilty. He did look like Beckett, but the thought was bad—the kind of thing Elaine would have broken up over. There were plenty of reasons to stare at him. He was tall and so forth. He remembered about his posture and straightened up. This part of Gaborone was like a university town someplace in the American Southwest, except for the walls and fences around the house plots. He had been in Africa so long that residential neighborhoods in America looked utopian—no property-line fencing to speak of, people’s lawns intermingling.

  He should enjoy nature more. There were a lot of gum trees on this route. There were other trees whose blooms looked like scrambled eggs. Lo noticed everything. The first time she’d seen him naked she’d noticed that his right arm was permanently darkened by the sun, from the elbow down, from having it out the window as he drove around Africa on site visits. Sometimes Lo said his name in her sleep. It moved him enormously. It was proof of something. He doubted Elaine had ever talked in her sleep. But how would he know, because in those days he slept at night, and Elaine was on her guard to the roots of her being. Lo wanted him to show more interest in the local birdlife. He thought, When it comes to bird-watching, I say let the birds watch me. A colony of Cape vultures had a nesting ground in the cliffs near Ootse. There was supposedly a trail up the cliffs, so that interested parties could get close enough to look directly at the vultures or even interfere with them. Lo wanted to go. He might be able to manage that.

  Just ahead, at the edge of the path, was a fruit stand—two upended cartons. The vendor was
a Motswana matron wearing a housedress and a blanket over it like an apron. He was going to be irritated, he could tell. He stopped to look over the display of bananas and green apples. The fruit was less than fresh—probably it had been four or five days on the street already. Batswana merchants absolutely would not bargain. This woman needed to clear her stock. She should lower her prices drastically, for the bananas at least. But she had her unit price figured and would stick to it unto death. She knew what the other street vendors were getting and would consider she was being made a fool of if she took less. If he offered a lower price, she would think he was trying to take advantage of her. He had been through this. The fruit came from South Africa and was substandard to begin with—ondergraad. The Batswana wholesalers were stuck with long-term contracts for fruit the South Africans wouldn’t touch. He knew all about it. It was a scandal.

  The vendor waited for him to say something. She decided to eat an apple. He predicted that she would take one of the best ones, not one of the least salable, and she did. Sometimes he thought southern Africa was specially designed to try the souls of small-business experts. He had had his difficulties persuading Africans elsewhere in the continent to be serious about business, but southern Africa was the sharpest thorn in his crown so far. He had to give himself mixed reviews at best for his performance to date—for his career—so he had to succeed in Botswana. This was not the best subject vis-à-vis his blood pressure. Botswana was probably his last chance to stay overseas. He ought to be able to succeed, because his main project was foolproof: it was all women, very tractable, making school uniforms for a guaranteed market—the state.

  The settlement with Elaine had impoverished him. Because of Lois, he had to be overseas to recoup, because the housing and utilities were covered and they could save like bandits. If they demoted him back to Washington, he and Lo would end up living like graduate students—at that level. Lo would have to go out and cashier. It was unthinkable. Since he’d stopped, he had to buy something from this woman. He paid twenty thebe for a banana—four thebe more than his highest estimate. Still, the woman was looking implacably at him. What had he done? It came to him: he had forgotten to greet her before starting the transaction. That made him a worm, in her eyes. He moved on.

  Secretaries and technical personnel tended to live at the embassy compound, a square of apartments around a microscopic swimming pool. One apartment had been turned over to the nurse, for a medical unit. In a previous incarnation he would have been interested in the nurse, Rita. She was single. She was low-forties and Hispanic, and tough. He liked lean women. He looked at the empty pool wrinkling and creasing in the noon sun. There was a woman he had read about, a prodigy, nineteenth century, who could sleep floating in water. It might have been a man. There had been two prodigies, one of them named Fraticoni, and one was the Human Magnet and metal objects stuck to him or her, and the other was the Human Cork, who could sleep floating.

  The nurse was steely. This was a lecture. “I’m not giving you any sleeping medication,” she said. “I don’t trust you around medication. You scared us with your X ray. We don’t need this. You showed four strange round spots in your gastric region which we finally figured out had to be mineral-supplement pills with a lot of iron in them you weren’t absorbing. Does anybody at your house know what vitaminosis is? Maybe you can’t sleep because you’re irritating your nervous system yourself with whatever you’re taking. If you want to self-medicate, then self-medicate, but don’t come to me looking for sympathy.” There was more. Did he know too much niacin could turn his face red? Was he aware that it was natural for the body to require less sleep as it aged? He used to think Rita liked him.

  “And also, I never want to find you in my office when I walk in,” she said. “I don’t want to make a big issue. But you sit in the waiting area, period.”

  “I was looking for you,” Carl said. The nurse began writing. Stepping into her office when he saw it was empty had been the latest in a recent line of bright ideas. He was having too many bright ideas. He had foreseen not getting pills. The possibility that he might spot some lying around loose in the empty office had suggested itself. Then there had been a vague idea that he might be able to do something against the dogs with a syringe, if he had a syringe. He had seen disposable hypodermics in Rita’s wastebasket more than once. One dog, a big orange bitch, seemed almost like the choirmaster of the pack. Whether dogs could die from an air-injection, he didn’t know. Would it have been feasible to creep up on the bitch while she was rooting around near the fence and jab her? Probably not. He had taken a stupid chance. He felt pale.

  Rita handed him the appointment card for his next shot. She reminded him to use the stress cassette she had given him, and said maybe he should try earplugs again. He got up, putting on his sunglasses. Lately his eyes were on the reddish side. The whites of Lo’s eyes were clear, like stationery. There was a problem connected with sunglasses, which he had to keep in mind. Apparently, older Batswana resented sunglass-wearing. A Member of Parliament had criticized young Batswana for wearing sunglasses, because it was disrespectful to conceal your eyes when you were in conversation. It had been in the Daily News. There was probably no special dispensation for expatriates.

  He left. Rita was dense about earplugs. From his standpoint, there were two things wrong with earplugs. He could hear through them—any that he had tried. And earplugs forced him to listen to his own heartbeat. He had a functional murmur. It was impossible not to listen for irregularities. Listening to his heartbeat was like listening to the drum in a Roman galley. He had explained all this, but she was still pushing earplugs. He forgave her. She still gave the best gamma-globulin shots in the foreign service. She always warmed up the ampule first in her bra and then had you toe-in to loosen up your gluteus muscle. The bruising was always minimal.

  He was yanked from sleep. The barking was on.

  Someplace he had seen a movie where the hero is dragged into the air on ropes attached to hooks in his flesh. This was similar, except that the movie ordeal had been an initiation for an English lord who wanted to be a Comanche brave for some unknown reason. So there was a point to it.

  The moon was full. It would almost be worth it to be a werewolf. After all, he would have his little problem only once a month, like women. Then he could take care of Letsamao’s dogs, either all at once or a few per month. But did werewolves eat dogs? He would.

  Normally, he would go to mind force now. But he had given up on mind force, permanently. That was clear. Mind force was the only form of warfare that would let him lie immobile and not wake Lois up. Unfortunately, it was a delusion and stupid. He had tried hard to give mind force the benefit of the doubt. After all, there was a Russian medium who could make matchsticks hop around under a bell jar, supposedly. Poltergeist cases seemed to reduce to something real—certain adolescents sending out streams of invisible energy able to smash crockery and empty ashtrays on their parents’ heads. Freud once made Jung faint through sheer hatred during an argument, according to Jung, and so on.

  Doing mind force, he had imagined white fire flowing up from the root of his spine and out between his eyes, where it would take weaponlike forms and destroy the dogs. He had started out with benign visualizations, such as sleep-inducing fog banks. Then he had escalated to winged nooses, blunt instruments, and on to spikes and blades. Sometimes he had accompanied his visualizations with body English, like tensing his neck cords or clenching his teeth.

  He was beginning to resent all the slow motion getting in and out of bed. He realized it was making him feel old. This time, he got out of bed normally. Lo murmured, but was asleep again by the time he had frozen. He picked up his bathrobe and went out into the breezeway to sit until daybreak.

  Diabolically, the barking stopped.

  Lois said good morning, startling Carl. She was in the kitchen doorway. There was something in her expression. It was possible he’d been thinking out loud about the breakfast he’d made, because, seeing
it all laid out, he realized it was excessive.

  “Hey, please don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to myself,” he said, getting a weak smile out of Lo.

  There were poached eggs, four slices of toast, broiled tomatoes, kippers, sliced peaches in maas, cornflakes, the last of their decent coffee. There was a reason for the extravagance. He had something urgent to get across. He felt that a leisurely breakfast would set up the right mood.

  Lo excused herself. She would never come directly from bed to the breakfast table. Even if breakfast was brought to her in bed, she would insist on getting up to rinse her face before eating anything. She was inflexible about it. That was an example of what was worrying him about her. He had a feeling that she’d made up her mind to appeal to the ambassador for a change of housing. Carl had to prevent that. He had already explained why, and she had seemed to be listening. But there was a reservation in her attitude that had him worried. She had a naïve conception of the ambassador and his powers. He sensed she was planning to do something. It wasn’t that Lois was aggressive by nature. Lo wasn’t even a feminist. But Lois loved him, and because of the dogs she was a potential fanatic on getting assigned to another house.

  They sat down together. There was no reference to the extent of the breakfast. She ate a little of everything, praising everything.

  Over coffee, he began. “Lo, I need you to promise me something.” He reached across the table for her hand. “I need you to swear on my life you won’t go to the ambassador about our housing.” She was silent. He knew that he had been right.

  He explained it all again, watching his tone. There were no alternative houses to be had. The housing shortage in the capital was grave. The Government of Botswana was going so far as to turn down any project that required it to provide housing in the capital for experts. The ambassador was not a god, and he was helpless on this issue. There was no way anyone in his right mind would trade quarters with them, because everyone knew about the dogs. Americans were doubling up in houses meant for one family. Contract people were stuck in hotels for months.