The Laughing Monsters

by Denis Johnson

  “I just said so.”

  “But let’s wait until we take it one tiny step further along. Let’s meet with these guys and their Geiger counter, and walk away with twenty-five K. Then no more. Nothing further than that.”

  “No brigands versus Mossad. No showdowns at the table.”

  “Exactly. And if they don’t like our lump of shit tomorrow—no loss. At least we tried.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes—tomorrow. I told you, full disclosure.”

  “Fuck it, Michael. I’m done.”

  I got up, making a loud noise with my chair, and headed out the door toward a place to be determined later.

  “How done?” Michael called after me.

  * * *

  In two minutes I arrived at the bar pretty nicely drenched. I took a table where I could watch the storm.

  At the bar sat Spaulding, his cranium wrapped in a big white turban. He pointed at it. “What do you think?”

  What I think—I thought to myself—is you’re spying on me.

  I checked my watch. Time to lift the drinks moratorium. An hour past.

  As I looked around for the barman, Spaulding came over to me. “Shit, Nair, I sort of didn’t recognize you yesterday. You know—without the uniform.” He set a full drink before me, saying, “Cheers, mate. It’s made with Baboon Whiskey.”

  Like that, I drank half of it down. “Have a seat.”

  “I really can’t. Car’s waiting. I’m checking out.”

  I nearly said, Good. “Where are you off to?”

  “Oh, God knows. The itinerary’s a bit complicated. Entebbe to start. What about you?”

  “Just here. Then home again.”

  “Home again to—”

  “Amsterdam.”

  “Amsterdam! I love the hash. Do you go to the coffee shops?”

  “Every day. Wrap up in my turban and get out my hookah and set fire to all manner of shit.”

  He laughed and said, “Happy trip, Nair,” and headed off briskly, with a sort of half salute that knocked at his stupid head-wrap.

  A bit sweet, but the drink had a kick. I signaled the barman. “Let’s try a vodka martini.”

  Rain swept across the pool’s face, and then it stopped. The sky was half-and-half—one storm had passed, another was coming. My first drinks in three days were going to my head, expanding my consciousness. I didn’t like it. I gulped the vodka without tasting it and made my way to my bungalow and changed into shorts and a long-sleeved shirt and lay down. The TV lit up when I tried it. I watched Ugandan news, a report about a pair of twins conjoined at the shoulder—in other words, a two-headed baby—who had died, and then one about a child whose face had been eaten by a pig. Its fingers as well.

  This information drove me out to a chair on the verandah. The sky was stuffed with thunderheads nearly black. I shut my eyes yet felt aware of the garden at my elbow, the blooms opening as if in a time-lapse, the stalks lengthening. Blossoms like dangling red bells, blossoms like tiny white fountains, fuzzy yellow caterpillars on brown twigs, a squad of snails lugging their small shelters up the spears of a plant.

  The moment was dark as evening, but all was bathed in a great vividness. The rain shot out of the sky, hard as hail. A wondrous assurance lifted me, a force positively religious invited me to stand and shed my shirt, to drop my shorts and kick them from my feet. No need of clothes when clothed in African magic, and I walked naked across the grounds through the booming and the lightning with the sweet rain pouring all around, and soon I stood looking down into the swimming pool. Everybody else was indoors, and through this whole experience no other person was visible anywhere in the world except the bartender, all alone behind the bar under his awning a few yards from the poolside, watching as I jumped into the water and drowned.

  From this dream I woke to another: I lay on my back beside the pool while Michael Adriko kissed me, breathed fire into my mouth and down my throat. I rolled over retching and coughing, my lungs tearing.

  I came awake again on a lower rung of reality, still lying on my back, but now in my hotel room, wrapped in a shroud, shivering. Michael sat beside me on the bed.

  I said, or tried to say, “You spat in my mouth.”

  “What happened to you, Nair?”

  “Somebody drugged me.”

  “You didn’t drug yourself?”

  “I had one whiskey and one martini. Maybe the olive was bad.”

  “Bad? You mean evil?”

  “What? Stop talking to me.”

  “Davidia is here,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Where? Here!”

  “I’m not there,” her voice said, “I’m here, on the verandah. Can you hear the crickets? Are those crickets?”

  All around the music, like little bells. “Some sort of insect, yes,” Michael said.

  “Spaulding did this to me. Was it Spaulding, do you think?”

  “It could be anything. A virus, a bite from a spider, or even a spell, a curse—people have such powers. I’ve seen too much to laugh at it.”

  “That fucking towel-head dosed my martini.”

  Michael laughed with such vigor that Davidia came in and looked at his face and said, “Are you all right?”

  “You should have seen Fred’s expression!” He meant the bartender. “Like the aliens were landing in his pool! Seriously,” he said, “he must have dragged you from the pool himself. He was wet to the waist. His shoes are ruined.”

  “I’ll give him some money,” I said.

  The rain had stopped, and Davidia was correct—the creatures had resumed, the bugs that chimed like porcelain, frogs that belched like drunkards, and now more frogs, snorting like pigs. A suffocating sleep fell over my face. I came under its shadow convinced that Spaulding had poisoned me.

  * * *

  The next morning I asked for Spaulding, and Emmanuel, the manager, said he’d settled his account and left in a taxi for Arua’s small airfield. Flying where? No commercial planes this morning, according to Emmanuel. Only the UN plane to Yei, in South Sudan.

  I continued on to the restaurant for my appointment with Michael Adriko. I’d promised to meet him there and tell him my decision.

  There he was, near the blaring television, doing nothing, not even watching it. “Well?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “Take your time. Up to ten more minutes. Don’t sit down. Walk with me,” he said, already moving, “I’ve got to see about the gas.”

  “Is it a long drive?”

  “Just into town, over by the market, but you know the rule—half a tank is empty. You remember the rule.”

  I remembered.

  When we came to the parking lot, he paused. “As of right now, the process is halted. You see how easy it is?”

  “I get uncomfortable when you stop in the middle of walking to make a point.”

  “At any moment in the procedure, we can say ‘enough.’”

  “I understood the point.”

  “Then understand this one: Do you really want to go back to that boring existence?”

  “Never.”

  This much was true, the only true thing between us.

  By now we’d reached his borrowed Land Cruiser. We both got in. The engine caught quickly, first try.

  The guard held the gate wide open for us.

  It was a years-old model, much like the blue-and-white Land Cruisers we’d often borrowed from the UN in Jalalabad, sometimes Kabul. Too much like. It even smelled the same inside, like spilt gas and dirty clothes.

  “Are you ready?”

  “No. For this? No.”

  * * *

  We stopped at a filling station where a woman topped off our tank, and we waited.

  “Near the market, you said?”

  “That’s all I know. They’ll call me with the meeting place. What time is it?—eleven-thirty-three,” he informed himself. “They’ll call me in the next half hour.” We sat side by side on the vehicle’s
rear bumper, Michael studiously smoking, blowing white puffs upward through the brown fumes and the red dust, under the yellow Shell insignia. After the call, he pocketed his phone and threw down his cigarette and stomped it like an insect. “We’re off.”

  We left the SUV in front of a place called Gracious Good Hotel, under care of the taxi drivers loitering there. Michael, a bright red zippered daypack slung over his arm, guided me across the street toward the market by way of a narrow alley with light at the far end, its crevices roiling with crippled beggars—many were blind, and as for the others, they seemed to look through your own eyes and down your throat. Ahead of me Michael was a bent silhouette, handing over a crumpled bill. “My name is Michael,” I heard him say, “pray for me.” An old woman caught the money between her leprous paws and turned her sightless eyes up toward him and her lips moved below the noseless hole in her face, praying, “Michael, Michael,” not for him, but rather to him, to the deity Michael … And crash, back into the daylight—it never happened …

  I caught up with Michael at a clothier’s stall. He was looking at a coat of fake black leather too hot for this region. He set his mirrors on his scalp, gripped the sleeve, touched the fabric with one finger. I didn’t know if he was trying to buy something or just delaying, looking out for a tail.

  The latter. When we left the market square he led the way into a dry goods store across the street. Inside we made our way directly down the center aisle to the back of the store, where a woman napped in a collapsible chair, and we asked her for another entrance. She pointed through a curtain, we passed through it and out into a side lane, then up to the left—and I recognized the street, and saw our Land Cruiser parked just a block away.

  He handed me his daypack. “Take charge of the little morsel.”

  “Of course.” Lethargy and nausea overtook me. It felt like it weighed fifty pounds.

  Michael said, “I go first. Wait until you see me come out again, then you’ll come and join me. It may take a few minutes.”

  “What’s going to happen in there?”

  “Before I bring you on the stage, I’ll say I want to see the cash. They’ll say no, but this way I get to review the environment.”

  “And then what?”

  “It’s two South African guys—Kruger is one, you saw him. You’ll verify everything I tell them, right? Then I’ll go with them. You can stay there—it’s that café there, you see it? I’ll go with them, we’ll sit in their car or something with the sample and their equipment, and we’ll make the exchange. And I’ll come back in and collect you, and then back to Nile Palace.”

  “Where’s their equipment, do you know?”

  “Ah—you’re thinking smart now. If it’s not in their car or somewhere we can walk, I’ll make them go get it. I’m not driving off with them.”

  On this sunny street, where earth-moving machines worked over piles of red dirt, improving the surface, and generators clattered in front of the shops and schoolchildren in green-and-white uniforms walked home for lunch, all this sounded reasonable.

  “Stop breathing so fast,” Michael said.

  “I’m fucking nervous.”

  “Good. It helps you look the part. Just don’t faint.” He left me standing there and in order to keep my mind off itself I studied the nearby billboard exhorting the use of condoms and followed the progress of a small car over the ruts and small boulders from one end of the block to the other, its horn playing the first six notes of the “Happy Birthday” song. Looking around for something else, I spied Michael already back outside, standing in his own spotlight in his aviator sun shades as if in support of the warning stenciled beside him: DO NOT URINE ON THIS WALL 30,000 FINE. And he wore the fake black leather duster from the market. I was nervous to the point that I hadn’t even seen him make the purchase.

  Michael must have sensed it. He took my arm and kept me going as we went inside. I was living one of my persistent nightmares: I step onto the stage, it’s time to speak, I don’t know my lines. In this particular bad dream the stage was a four-by-four-meter dirt space enclosed in ironwork and roofed with tin, with a sign on the left saying SIMBA DISCO / PHONE CHARGE ACCUMULATOR AVAILABLE and on the right a Bell Lager clock with one hand, counting only the minutes, and wooden tables and benches. We sat down across from the South Africans.

  They were a half-and-half team, like Michael and me. The black one, I assumed, was Zulu, and could have been one of Kruger’s math pupils, but he looked in his thirties too. He wore his sunglasses on the back of his shaved skull. In most other respects he seemed to be trying to resemble an American rapper: a hooded sweater, baggy hip-hop shorts I hadn’t seen anyone wearing in Uganda. A word about this Zulu’s shoes. They were purple joggers, elaborately designed and, by the look of them, enclosing enormous feet. There’s no explaining why I should have been so penetratingly aware, at this moment, of anybody’s fashion choices. Kruger suggested a drink, and I certainly concurred, and now came the moment when I discovered the East African quick-shot—a square plastic envelope that would fit in your palm and holding one hundred milliliters of, in this case, Rider Vodka—Sign of Success. You chew off a corner and slurp. I bought several, several. The floor was tiled with discarded packets.

  Michael produced a cigarette and called for a light, and the barman brought over several for sale. Michael had to try three or four of them before he got one that worked.

  Kruger said, “Everything here is fake.”

  Michael said, “Only my heart is real,” and put away his cigarette.

  I wasn’t taking in much, only the Rider Vodka. Remarks were delivered, there was talk of a Geiger counter, the location of their car, mention was made, in fact, of roentgens, but of all this I registered one exchange only: Michael said, “Nice necklace, brother,” and Kruger said, “I like yours too,” and when Michael thanked him, Kruger added, “It looked good on my friend before you stole it,” and Michael said, “Who? What friend?” at which point, as if time had skipped forward, the three of them were standing up and fighting. The Zulu had Michael from behind in a bear hug, or was trying to pin his elbows, while Michael twisted side to side and the Kruger fellow thrust with a knife at Michael’s chest and belly, then at Michael’s throat.

  Another skip—the Zulu lay on his back, wide-eyed, struggling to take a breath. Michael had hurt him somehow. I had an impulse to act, an image flitted through me, I saw myself taking two steps, jumping onto the man’s chest, standing on him, keeping him down. No part of me acted. I experienced it as a question only—shouldn’t I, shall I. I didn’t. Now the seconds passed more fluidly, as if a stuck film had caught in its sprockets, and I watched the movie, which wasn’t like the movies after all, not even like a boxing match on TV. I heard the initial thumps, then my hearing turned cottony, and I remember Michael’s eyes—they watched, they looked, they moved here, there, they gauged—when he had his target, he locked on Kruger’s face, not on his hands, though one hand gripped the knife in preparation for downward thrusts—

  Michael danced backward, knocked a bench over between them, plucked at the table—a salt shaker in his hand; he threw it hard, it struck the man’s chest, and Michael followed its arc, picking up the bench as he closed on his opponent, ramming the flat seat against him. Kruger fell backward as Michael’s feet left the floor, one hand at Kruger’s throat, the other still holding the bench in place, and his weight stuck the man to the table. His fingers closed on the carotid arteries, and Kruger lost conscious swiftly—a matter of a few seconds—managing to slash at Michael only once with the knife, which sailed to the floor, along with the bench, as Michael stood and snapped Kruger’s arm over his knee. The breaking of the bone was quite pronounced. Deaf with adrenaline, I nevertheless heard that sound crisply. I heard it echo back into the room from the surrounding hills.

  Michael wasted no time continuing the contest. He signaled me, I stood still, he came close, gripped my wrist, and before I formed even my first thought about what was happening, we
were both in the Toyota and moving along as Michael steered with both hands, saying, “Wrap my arm, wrap my arm.” His right forearm bled in spurts. He extended it across his chest toward me, steering with his left hand, and I understood at last, and found my bandanna and wrapped it around a long gash that showed the yellowish bone. I tied it with a square knot. “That’s going to need stitches,” was his first remark since the action had begun. “So much for South Africa,” was his second.

  * * *

  Michael pointed out the White Nile Palace as we passed it. “I want you to drive back here after you drop me at the hospital.”

  “Where’s the hospital?”

  “I’ve seen the signpost up here a couple of kilometers. We go to the right. After that I don’t know.”

  We rumbled across a wooden bridge. Ahead of us a pedestrian, an old man, jumped up on the railing to save himself.

  “Well,” I said, “I wasn’t much use to you, was I?”

  “But, Nair—what’s there, between your feet?”

  “For goodness’ sake.” His red daypack.

  “You grabbed my bag. You saved the most important thing. The valuables.”

  A couple of minutes off the main road we found the hospital, a campus of one-story structures of concrete and brick, the Church of Uganda Kuluva Hospital, according to the sign at the guard post. The guard waved us down and peered through the window and waved us through when he saw the blood. “Nurse is coming,” he said. “Proceed to Minor Theatre.”

  The door to the building called Minor Theatre was locked. Michael squatted on his haunches with his spine against the wall, smoking, while the blood seeped from his bandage and pooled between his feet. His eyes were bright and he gave off a certain energy.

  He looked, I have to say, in better shape than I felt. I stood upright, but only to prove I was able. “I wish I’d made one tiny fucking move to help.”

  “I didn’t need help. Did you hear his bone breaking?”

  “God. I didn’t even drive the car. I’ve always known I’ve got zero courage, but I don’t like to be reminded.”

  “There’s no such thing as courage. It’s a question of training. You know, I’m not merely trained in unarmed combat—I’m the instructor.”