In Vienna he switched flights for Skopje, renting on arrival a hard-shell car with armor plating. Avoiding his colleagues, he made a swift round among the bureaucrats, handing over cash and passport photographs to update accreditations, careful to stash them in separate pockets to avoid confusion at roadblocks. Locked in the car trunk were his laptop and spare batteries, drinking water and satellite phone—a valuable cargo that could provoke envy and cause trouble. He mapped a route that would cross lines through the Balkan patchwork—a not-for-beginners trajectory that would take him from one warlord to the next, under a variety of friendly and unfriendly guns. Climbing into his hard car, he told himself that his arm was fine, that the quivering would go away, that the American physicians would fix it with some wonder drug, some slice of the scalpel just as soon as he had completed this one assignment.
He paid the mandatory calls on the United Nations career optimists in their sandbagged offices adorned with large-scale, laminated maps that reduced the fault lines of the centuries into bold strokes of red, green and black marker-pen, as if that made them more open to resolution, as if the pen strokes themselves did not define the age-old chemistry of outsiders meddling in intractable, local matters. In the four days between assignment and deadline, he maneuvered his left arm awkwardly to take notes. Crouching beside fugitives to drain the distillate of their misery, he found he did not rise as easily as he had once done when he stood up, the interview over. He assembled in thick notebooks the variants and gradations of loathing from dignitaries and peasants who drew their allegiances from some indecipherable point five hundred years earlier. With a variety of rapacious and untrustworthy guides, he secured his moment of exclusivity by locating the wooded laager where fierce, anonymous men in beards with flared eagle badges sewn on U.S. surplus tunics crouched in the forest over AK-47 rifles and swore eternal hatred of the Serbs, the Germans, the United Nations and Uncle Sam. With a shiver of sadness, he acknowledged to himself—but to himself only—that the adrenaline rush of a scoop had, over the years, become secondary to rank fear. Each war, each adventure took its tally among those who took their invulnerability a step too far. The roll call was surprisingly modest considering the Faustian pact that underlay it. But, just as Mephistopheles would surely come to claim his prize and Dr. Faustus would resist, so, too had his own bargain worn thin. How could you sup from the cocktail of adrenaline and triumph when your body betrayed you?
—
In a concrete hotel, in this dour provincial capital, he settled before his troika of notebook, Scotch and laptop. Somewhere, trailing him, following his story through terse exchanges of e-mail, Faria Duclos had been assigned to match his words with pictures, gliding just beyond his field of vision, just inside the stockade that Eva Kimberly had erected around his heart. She, too, would have made her arrangements, hired her hard car. She, too, would be traveling alone—all the worse for a woman, a raven-haired ravaged beauty at that—along empty roads that the world mostly ignored.
In their barracks, National Guardsmen and Royal Marines hunkered down, giving no interviews or access. After 3:00 P.M., the roads became a nightmare. Chetnik snipers, his Albanian translator, Fatima, told him, were the hazard. Muslim dogs, said Danica, a Croat stringer who also had lines into the Serbs, fertilized by common hatreds creating alliances that would, at best, be temporary.
He had been on these same roads before, on an earlier assignment, when a car in front of him took a mine, eliminating Thatcher from Newsweek and Slingsby from The New York Times in one blast of fire and metal and dismemberment that had sent him and Faria spilling into the noisome ditches as the routine, post-mine machine-gunfire hosed down the debris, an indifferent hail of .50 cal fire that kept them pinned for three hours until the gunners wearied of their sport and returned laughing to their tough-guy brandies. What had the macho-man Thatcher said, the night before, over late whiskies? “Don’t think of the bang. Think of the enveloping red wetness.”
He would have all eternity to mull that wisdom.
—
In London, Eva Kimberly drove smooth roads in black cabs with voluble drivers bearing her to the dark reaches of Primrose Hill while her heart departed on its own, Africa-bound coordinates. Most times, she answered the phone in their shared apartment when he called from his satellite equipment, and he would listen for the hint of a gin-genie in her voice then check the time difference to calculate whether she had started early or late. But she would start, sooner or later. That was never in doubt, anymore than his absences and returns. If the genie was well and truly loose, she would ask whether he had seen her and he would say, no, he had not seen her for a long time. But he did not say that she was never far away, physically or otherwise.
Now, sitting before his icons, he raised his hands to the keyboard of his laptop, the organist summoning the faithful to commune, to reenact the mystery of words. He closed the drapes tight against the nocturnal sniper-fire that drew tracer lines between shabby apartment houses, sending side messengers to probe any pinprick of light. Still, stray rounds nicked the concrete walls, and sometimes shattered windows criss-crossed with gray duct tape against heavier explosions. He switched on the desk light, leaving just a pool of brightness around his props—his notebook and his whisky glass, his pack of cigarettes and chipped ashtray bearing the mocking insignia of a glitzy, international hotel chain: The World’s Greatest Hotels. How long ago had that been true?
The screen was bright, blank.
In his mind, he was building the anecdote that would provide the introduction to his article. Thatcher and Slingsby had been a cover: The War Junkies. An Eyewitness Account. This time, the cover would read: Mayhem in the Balkans: Should Our Troops Come Home? Even now, in New York, they would be looking at the time-zone clocks on the wall in the big, whispering edit room and they would be wondering how much longer they could wait to call Shelby to remind him that it was show time. Show-and-tell. Joe Shelby was on deadline with a fat notebook and no time in the world. All he had to do was write. That had always been the easy part.
But now he could not.
Called upon to tap at its designated keys, his left hand slid away from the keyboard. Inexplicably, his left arm swung at his side. He stared at it as if it belonged to someone else entirely. Where there had been quivering in the upper arm muscles, the biceps lay flaccid along his upper arm, useful as a beached jellyfish. He closed his eyes, as if that would focus great power and authority on his mental order to move, but the limb disobeyed. His arm died on him, betrayed him, offering no mercy, with no right of appeal before the death knell sounded. Show time, and nothing to show. His will had failed him.
He sought again to use the keyboard with both hands, canting himself over so that he could use his shoulder muscles to swing his left arm into a position remotely close to the keypad. But, seeking to move his fingers, the arm again slipped from his knee. With his right hand he took a swig of Scotch, then maneuvered a Marlboro from its pack, and lit it again with the lighter in his right hand. The blank screen mocked him. When he sought to compose with his right hand only, the words stumbled incoherently across the laptop window like one of those very old telex circuits transmitting at a quarter speed.
The guerilla commander squatted in the forest camp. Sounds like he’s taking a crap.
Deep in the killing fields of the Balkans. Used that six months ago. Bad then. Worse now.
The commander tightened his grip on his worn AK-47. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What’s wrong?
Joe Shelby knew exactly what he wanted to say: he wanted to say that this bearded man led a band of degenerates who, under the guise of nationalism, had committed an atrocity they blamed on their opponents. And the reason they had done so was to protect a prospering narcotics fiefdom. It should have been easy enough just to get that across, with an admixture of atmosphere and location and cliché to create the requisite mix of journalism lite favored by the comic. But, with his left arm refusing the simplest of orders, it was as if his ability to
write had been reduced by much more than half, as if expression were a two-handed matter, requiring the full gamut of eight fingers and two thumbs to keep pace with the tumble of words and ideas generated by his memories, his notes, the very deadline urgency of what was to be written. Remove one hand and the channel that bore the currents from brain to screen was narrowed, too constricted for the full flow of thought and language. All that emerged was a sad, halting trickle. If he spoke his ideas out loud, he had some sense of what he might achieve. But when he tried to capture those same ideas on the screen—or by taking notes with his right hand—the filter re-inserted itself. Joe Shelby was a left-hander, a southpaw, and his right hand could not write more than a scrawl, or type alone at the speed he needed to keep pace with the whirl of what he most wanted to say.
He knew from the e-mail traffic that she was in town. He knew he could ask no one else to help him without demanding a price, a countertrade. He knew that, when he called, she would come and he would not be able to vouch for the emotions she might inspire.
“I wish I could tell you,” he said.
Chapter Seven
TAPE ONE, SEGMENT THREE
SEPTEMBER 14, 2:15 P.M.
MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17
First summit. FIRST SUMMIT. I’m here. I’M HERE. Dow Crag. 2,555 feet. Almost missed it in the fog. I’ve reached a summit and if the sun was shining I’d be able to see all the way over to Scafell Pike. Chomolungma. I’d be looking at Coniston Old Man across that huge hole I’ve just climbed up through. I’d look south way out over Morecambe Bay to Blackpool Tower—on a clear day. GPS coordinates SD 26262 97781. But I can’t call anybody. No cell phone. No microwave signal. No satellite disk. Not even a carrier pigeon. Freedom. Alone, perched on the summit rocks, cold and damp and what? Triumphant. Yes, I guess triumphant. Because it was tough. And I can go down again now, can’t I? Back down the easy way onto the Walna Scar Road with the compass and the map and get to a phone and call Eva and say: look, I did what I needed to do and I’m back and I’ve proved my point. Except I haven’t. How long ago is it now since I was last here on this same old beautiful lump of rock? Fifteen, sixteen years? And in those days, in summer, when we were all hot and sweaty and thirsty, we’d hit the summit last thing after climbing all day so that our arms felt they’d been pulled out of the sockets and we were all weighed down with ropes and crabs and nuts, and we’d tally up how many thousand feet of rock we’d done so we could measure the total to see how it tallied against the height of the North Wall of the Eiger. Then run—I mean RUN—down South Rake and the scree and all the way down to the pub in Torver. There’d sometimes be youth hostel girls hiking their way around and that would be a bonus if you got a lucky fumble and we were always lucky. And now all memory. Sometimes you have to just stop and think and say to yourself: I did the climbs, and hit the roads, and read the poems and wrote some and covered my share of boom-boom so the innings wasn’t too bad. Awful. Those cricketing metaphors. Don’t cross the pond, the comic reckons. But it’s part of dinosaur Englishness: remember that poem? “And his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote: play up and play the game.” Well, I guess I played the game, but not always by the rules. I made my choice. I hit the road when some of the others were getting mortgages and houses and wives and families. And now they’ve got the Merc-in-the-drive pile. And I’ve got this pile of wet rock I’m sitting on and a quivering arm and a leg with all the power and resilience of Jell-O. The arm of flesh shall fail you, as the hymn says. But if you add it all up, would you rather have stayed and been safe or would you rather have done what you did?
The point is I got this far. Whatever happens now I got this far. The mist just cleared for a second and I saw Coniston Water and I thought of Donald Campbell in 1967 when he crashed his Bluebird trying to break his own speed record and went down to the bottom. He made it. That’s what he was thinking when the boat lifted off and cartwheeled over and smashed him to bits with the impact of hitting a brick wall at 300 mph. I made it this far, he was thinking, and no one can take that away now whatever happens. But, then, look how it turned out for him.
GRASMERE, ENGLAND. SEPTEMBER 14, 2000
The mist had not lifted. The rain had not stopped. She was conscious of time moving at a submarine pace since Joe Shelby disappeared behind a veil of drizzle that explained to her why this region specialized primarily in green grass and sheep that grew so fat from eating it. The valleys were so steep that her cell phone had lost its signal. Beyond the drystone walls, uneven fields led up to a scraggly tree line that eventually petered out in rough, gray crags and seas of bracken turning from green to gold and then to a dull sepia, entwined intimately with wraiths of mist. Beyond that there would be soaring, glorious asymmetrical peaks with inscrutable names—Harrison Stickle, Pike o’Stickle, Pike o’Blisco, Bowfell, Crinkle Crags. Somewhere up there, a limping man struggled on, unable to take no for an answer, to recognize that his luck had run out, a Canute proving that the tide of mortality was invincible—so sure of himself that he’d refused to take a radio, and so deeply uncertain that he’d stopped to pray before he set off. For what? For strength and forgiveness? For three more days? For the people he always managed to leave behind as he indulged himself? Or perhaps it was worse than she thought—a moment in a cold chapel to request the extreme unction, the last rites, according to some inner voice that decreed he must perish high in the mountains, make his death as much of a drama as he had sought from his life. Was that what the Lake District’s muse would require of him as the price of his self-aggrandizement?
—
Turn whereso’er I may / By night or day / The things which I have seen I now can see no more. And, again: But yet I know, where’er I go / That there hath past away a glory from the earth. The lines had been underlined in pencil in the pocket Wordsworth which, after some consideration of weight-versus-spiritual-uplift, he’d left behind in the glove compartment of the car. His intimations were more of mortality than immortality. But he had penciled another line with a faint exclamation mark, an ironic notation: And I again am strong.
—
She had no particular agenda. She had a day to fill before arriving in Thirlmere to the north, stopping in the slate-gray, rain-glistening town of Ambleside and turning up her collar against the wind to meander among almost-out-of-season stores that still refused to reduce their prices on boots and parkas, souvenirs and a curious confection called Kendal Mint Cake that tasted to her like pure sugar injected with some minty essence. At a liquor store, she pondered whether to buy a half or a full bottle of single malt and settled on a full bottle which she stowed in the leather grip in the trunk of the car. For their reunion, of course.
From a desolate car park in Bowness on the lake shore, where the wind flurried and raced over puddles of rainwater on the gray tarmac-adam, and the rain traversed Windermere in solemn, veiled procession, she made calls on a faint wireless signal, reestablishing contact with the various strands of her business: the Web site manager and the shippers, the accountant who kept track obsessively of the cash flow and pronounced it sound. She tried to raise her store in Nairobi, but succeeded only in connecting to a recorded announcement in Swahili and English saying that all circuits were busy. She was adrift, severed from her daily business and her distant home. For her vigil she had packed a serious biography and a sheaf of paperwork, weighing down her leather grip with its cargo of practical day wear and reunion clothes with their optimistic frills and fripperies. Laying the Scotch among them, like a doll or a child, she thought: is this my baby? My muse? My sole companion? And was I like this before he initiated me into the art of solo consumption, into the slow lonely slide from sharp functionality to the blurred edges of self-pity and imprecision? Of course not. So why do I allow myself to be seduced by it now? Despairing of ever finding a familiar, friendly voice, she switched off the phone altogether and rolled slowly north on the prescribed route. By lunchtime she was hungry, as much for company as for food. She had been unable t
o show the same enthusiasm for breakfast as Joe Shelby had, awkwardly maneuvering his fork and knife to attack a plate of bacon, eggs, Cumberland sausage and a menacing concoction called black pudding made of blood. Instead she had nibbled at toast, toyed with muesli, and now the chill in the air gnawed at her. She had meandered to a place called Grasmere that offered white-painted hostelries with black window frames and lunch menus. The rain cascaded down from the steep fellsides, pressing her indoors to seek refuge.
Perusing a menu, she ordered a gin and tonic, then a half-bottle of red wine from some indistinct vineyard in Chile, breaking her resolution to hold off until evening almost before it was made. At the bar, an intense, dark-haired young man in his twenties who had parked his little sporty car next to hers on the gravel parking lot cast a predatory eye over her.
Freedom, she decided. This was freedom. Freedom from Joe and his brooding. Freedom from the never-spoken answer to the spectral question: what if it’s incurable, like they say? Freedom to throw caution to the winds. She was, technically, free to go anywhere, do anything she wanted. Freedom from unscheduled reappearances in the boudoir. Freedom from guilt.
It was a freedom she had hardly known, still less enjoyed. Always there had been a clamor for her attention from her school friends and playmates and college associates and pupils and patients: then, after the death of her mother, the same demands were made in her long relationship with Jeremy Davenport, most of all within the network that represented the extended family—Africa’s blend of support and bondage. What freedom was there in the tending of a querulous father, the peremptory demands of an arrogant lover, the calls from distant pay phones to say a clinic had been ransacked, a child had died, a girl had been raped by an uncle?
Africa did not permit freedom. Africa placed you at a fixed point within a constellation of unchosen relationships—nephews, aunts, parents—all with their demands, their needs, their assumptions of support. And she too had those same needs so that, at home, among the people she had grown up with, she understood her location perfectly, without need of his GPS devices or compasses or questions. She knew she was part of the broader landscape, while Joe Shelby knew he was alone. For him, freedom could only be exercised in solitude. But how could you be free when you hankered for a companion’s voice and touch and solace, or pined for the familiar joys and irritations of friends, acquaintances, family? But, then, how could you exploit liberty to the full if those same people filtered your vision, rode shotgun on your impulses, built firewalls around your ambitions and desires? How could you be free to exploit wealth and good fortune when the immediate assumption in your entourage was that you would share it, dilute it? That was Africa’s dilemma and curse.
A Walking Guide Page 9