An Obvious Enchantment

by Tucker Malarkey

  And she had. She had done what she had said she would. She had done it for him, for the challenge and then, later, for the subject itself. No civilization she had studied engrossed her like Egypt. That such integrated intelligence had existed so long ago and had subsequently been buried confirmed to her that evolution was not a continuum, but something that occurred in isolated outbreaks, splendid accidents. In the case of Egypt, the miracle of the pyramids had been started by an incidental alignment of precise engineering, a potent belief system and fearless imagination. And where had it all gone? Where? Ingrid found herself nostalgic for a culture that had the will and passion to construct such monumental temples to its own hubris and insecurity.

  She sat up in bed and pressed her hand against the solitary shadow of her head on the wall. If she were to live as long as her mother, three quarters of her life was over. Was it a triumph to have the years move at such a speed? If so, where were the rewards, the evidence of its passage? Where? No husband, no child, no pyramid. At the moment, no career. It felt like a trick had been played on her. At least I haven’t married out of fear, she thought. “That won’t be your mistake,” Templeton told her once. “Nor has it been mine—yet. But I’m older than you, and fear approaches suddenly.” Ingrid lay back down and watched the trees replace her shadow.

  Before Templeton had left for Africa in June, she had taken him to Lake Superior. He had composed a strange, unexpected picnic for her. He was quiet throughout the drive, maintaining a contemplative silence for over an hour. In the weeks before Ingrid left for Egypt, he had given himself over to an awkward, last-minute education, things he might have missed telling her over the years. “I’m trying to show you the bread crumbs you keep asking for,” he explained. “To show I didn’t just arrive at this place in my life as the crow flies—nor can you.”

  “But the chapters are linked. You can make sense of them.”

  “Well, fine, but you cannot get a summary statement about life—yours, mine, a toad’s—and get the whole picture. That is why I don’t like my own biographical information floating around. We believe we can locate ourselves and each other with a few scratches on a page. The only way we can locate ourselves is to look at where we are. The quality and amount of light, the minerals in the tap water, the weather and the way it impacts us—because we are every bit as much animals as a herd of cows mooing when the air pressure drops, sensing rain.” Ingrid enjoyed watching the rare event of Templeton relaxing, overflowing with an unobstructed sense of well-being.

  He lay back on the grass and stuck a blade in his mouth. The lines in his brow softened. He sighed between olives, alternating between pungent Greek kalamatas and fat green ones stuffed with garlic. He spit the kalamata pits onto the ground and said a brief prayer in Greek for future olive trees, the first in Michigan. “Have you seen an olive grove? It’s like a shimmering ocean. The leaves are dense and silvery green. From the mountainside of Delphi, you can see olive groves melt into the Aegean, one glimmer replacing the other and stretching on and on and on.” Ingrid was spreading what looked like pâté on a slice of miniature rye. “Don’t forget the cornichons,” he instructed. “There’s a bottle of them in there somewhere.”

  He continued to ruminate in silence. Ingrid bunched up her sweater and lay down on the grass. The sky was buoyed with high, white clouds. She began to tell him then about how she had almost been killed as a child when the nanny her father had employed after her mother’s death drove them over an embankment into a tree. Her father blamed himself for hiring someone from the South, where they didn’t know about braking on ice. The young woman had died instantly. Ingrid, who was seven, held on to her hand and did not cry. Seven bones were broken in her foot and ankle; and pieces of them still floated around like driftwood.

  “Six years I’ve known you,” he had said, “and I can confirm that you are still a woman of secrets. A little flotsam isn’t so bad. A good reminder that we are all so many bits and pieces.” He dug into the picnic basket and extracted a pomegranate. “A very dangerous fruit,” he said, tucking his napkin into his collar. He offered Ingrid a section and then said a short prayer for her nanny and then another for poor old Persephone and her approaching sentence in Hades. The smooth crimson seeds stained their fingertips. Templeton popped a handful into his mouth. “Did you know Zeus swallowed his first wife, Mita? It was prophesied that Mita would bear a son who would one day overthrow him. So down the hatch with Mita. She lived inside his head, poor thing.”

  Ingrid had since thought about the possibility that she had similarly ingested the man who told her the story, that he lived inside her. She couldn’t pinpoint when she was suddenly able, in his absence, to hear Templeton’s voice.

  “When you get back,” he said then, “I may be gone.”

  Ingrid frowned. “When you go,” she said. “Do you always go alone?”

  “Lord, yes,” and then a rare smile. “Practice what I preach.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  Colin

  There was a man at the Chichester who, like Ingrid, sat through the dinner meal alone, reading or writing at his table. He was young and sober-looking, though he drank three pints of stout with his meal. She noticed him because his slightly stooped posture, agitated intensity and clean haircut suggested academe.

  On her second night she watched him from her corner, tapping her pencil on another blank page in her notebook. His head shot up and he laughed almost maniacally at the empty place across from him. “Remarkable,” he said out loud, not exactly to Ingrid, though there was no one else in the room. “Hatched his wings right there on the table, dried them off and went off to see the world.”

  After that he introduced himself and they spoke across the room. His name was Colin. He was a doctoral student from Cambridge, an entomologist who spent most of his time with army worms down in Makindu. “Nasty pests that wipe out crops every three years. They’ve just done their work again so I’ve come down ahead of schedule. The alternative was to wait another three years in the stinkin’ lab. You can learn more from a week in the field than a year in the lab. Least with army worms.” Colin finished his pint of beer and held up an index finger for another as the dinner waiter emerged from the kitchen, coffee in hand. The waiter, a simple man who had many times proven his inability to deviate from the set menu, was confused. “British Mister wants coffee and beers?”

  “I know it’s bad form, but yes.” The waiter shrugged and scuffled off to the bar. “Always feel like I’m keeping the bloke awake.”

  “You are.”

  “Tried talking to him yesterday. After a few weeks with the worms, I’ll talk to anything.”

  After dinner, Colin refilled his stout at the bar and led Ingrid to the garden, where he pushed his glass into the dirt and knelt in the darkness. “Listen,” he whispered. “Can you hear that? The steady undertone to our screeching. Bloody musical they are. Most people can’t hear them even when they’re squashing them underfoot. They’re like the bass in the band, thrum thrum thrum. Don’t know it’s there but you couldn’t do without it.”

  Ingrid saw his long fingers join to make a spade and scoop the earth between the passion flowers, sifting through it nimbly, looking for worms and larvae. She sat on the tiles of the walkway and kept her eyes on his hands, which caught the light from the walkway when he held them close to his face to inspect the black soil. “Astounding proliferation of insect life here,” he said. “Enough nocturnal activity to keep you up till dawn.” She thought about how academics lost sight of themselves and saw only their subject, how this liberated them from their own scrutiny. It was an inadvertent act of self-generosity; allowing one’s self to be, uninterrupted by observation.

  “You haven’t met a man named Nick Templeton here, have you? He would have been staying in room nine. He comes and goes from the coast, but uses the Chichester as his base.”

  “Ah.” Colin smiled. “Is he who you’re after?”

  “No. I’m here doing field
work, like you. Cultural anthropology.”

  “Great stuff, that. Don’t think I know your friend.”

  “He’s a colleague,” Ingrid explained. “I’m trying to get myself to the coast to find him.”

  Colin paused in his digging and took a swallow of beer. “You in love with him?”

  “He’s my professor.”

  “Ever been in love?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm what?”

  “I’m one of those people who get asked that question a lot.”

  A room opened down the walkway and they turned to see a tall, barefooted man walking away from them, headed toward the bar. Ingrid stared after him.

  “He’s wearing a skirt,” she said.

  “That’s a kikoi. Native garb. The men on the coast wear them.”

  “But he’s white.”

  “Probably a white African. Born here from European parents, raised by the African help. Played with African children. Fascinating, conflicted group, especially for a cultural anthropologist. They don’t know which tribe they belong to.”

  “Maybe he knows Templeton.”

  Colin finished his beer. “Have you seen Nairobi?”

  “Not much. It hasn’t been highly recommended.”

  He dusted off his hands. “While you won’t find anything too ancient, it’s still good to see a country’s cities. Let’s go for a drive. I wanted to show you my worms but it seems they’re lunching somewhere else.”

  They walked in darkness to an ancestral jeep, parked at the side of the hotel. Its edges were jagged with rust and it had no doors. Colin helped Ingrid into her seat. “How are you getting to the coast?”

  “Train, in principle. But I couldn’t get a reservation until Wednesday. I wish I could get there sooner—I don’t have much to do around here.”

  “If you don’t mind the vehicle, I’d be happy to give you a lift.”

  “Why, are there army worms on the coast?”

  “There’s everything on the coast. It’s a great festering petri dish of insects.”

  “Great. Well, if you’re serious about the ride, I’ll take you up on it. I’d love to leave tomorrow.”

  “First thing, then,” Colin said. “You’ll get used to the doors.”

  Colin drove fast. Too fast. Ingrid clung to the edges of her seat when he made sudden and reckless turns that led them to what Colin called “the underbelly” of the city. She studied his profile as they drove slowly down a poorly lit street. He was handsome: boyish but strong. She turned away sharply when he caught her staring.

  Outside, there were women standing on the sidewalk. Some of them walked alongside the jeep, touching Colin’s leg as he drove by. “Hello, jeep man,” they said, smiling. “Where have you been?”

  “So they know you,” Ingrid observed quietly.

  A particularly thin woman came up alongside the car. “You got a woman now, vunjika mtu?”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Colin told her. She smiled coyly and licked her lips. He turned to Ingrid. “I knew her sister. They’re dying, you know.” He turned to the woman in the street. “You’re dying.” She winked and followed a car going in the opposite direction. “Here and in Mombasa where they work the sailors. French and American naval bases. They don’t understand what’s killing them. No one in the country will use a freaking condom. In Uganda they do. For some reason they understand there. Here it’s about virility and fertility and the unmanliness of a latex barrier; an undermining of the strength of numbers. The oldest rule. It will kill them. The disease will beat the birth numbers. The babies will be born diseased.” He pressed his foot to the accelerator, leaving the women behind. Ingrid turned back and could see only their silhouettes. “I tried to tell her, that one’s sister. She laughed at me, called me vunjika mtu, which means, essentially, limp penis. She thought I preferred to talk instead of fuck. Another cultural difference. I’m a good Catholic boy, you see.”

  Colin took a joint from his shirt pocket. He held a match to its tip and the pungent smell swirled around the jeep. “Do you smoke this stuff?” Ingrid shook her head. “When in Rome . . .” He inhaled the weed and held the smoke in his chest. “Malawi Gold,” he exhaled and smiled into the headlights of an oncoming car. “Magic.”

  Ingrid had never seen a man hold things the way Colin did. Simple objects; a joint, a pint of beer, a handful of soil. His fingers were long and flat and they adhered to bottles and glasses of drinking water with the solidity and semipermanence of warm wax. She took the joint from him and held it in her own stiff fingers. The wind in the jeep made the ember burn red, specks of color flew from the tip as she held it out in the open air. “Let’s go back,” she said.

  “You ever get lonely?” Colin asked when they pulled in to the Chichester.

  Ingrid hesitated. “Of course.”

  “Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  Ingrid sat rigidly on the edge of Colin’s bed while he relit his joint and flipped through a Gideon Bible, licking his finger lightly and turning the onionskin pages to find passages and scan columns that he read to himself and not to her. The motion of his fingers and the soft crinkling of the paper mesmerized her. She had closed her eyes when she felt his fingers on her shirt, gently exploring the shape of her breasts. “No,” she said, instantly regretting it because the word sounded somehow violent. As it hovered between them, Ingrid considered taking it back, retrieving it. But then what?

  “No,” Colin acknowledged soberly. “Of course not.”

  Ingrid stood abruptly. “I’ll go now, Colin,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  He held his hand out to her. “There is a kind of frog in the desert. He lives underground and creates a shell of saliva that hardens around him and keeps him moist. When it rains in the desert, once, maybe twice a year, he comes out, jumps around, finds a female to fuck and then goes back down.” She looked at his fingers extending toward her, the pale fingers of a ruminating saint. Pressing them quickly into hers, she stepped past him. “She died, you know. Sheba’s sister. That’s how fucking stupid they are here.”

  Something crashed against the wall after she shut the door behind her.

  The man she had seen earlier was sitting in the doorway of room number eight, his bare legs extended. Above his legs, which were long and tanned, was a yellow kikoi, and above that the white plume of cigarette smoke. Ingrid slowed as she approached the doorway. When she turned to look at his face, she saw only shadow. Nothing in his posture registered her arrival. She stopped and took a step backward so that she stood in front of him. “You’re from the coast,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m looking for someone there.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “He kept a room here. I was thinking you might know him.” The man closed his eyes. He seemed to be dozing. “Do you have another cigarette?” she asked.

  His shirt pocket rustled with cellophane and a cigarette emerged from the darkness. “You’ll have to come down here for a light.” The voice was barely audible.

  Ingrid leaned toward him and was immediately blinded by a flame. She sat back on her haunches with the cigarette, blinking the image of the flame, the damage of its brightness.

  “I’ve just had the strangest conversation,” she said.

  From him another exhalation, no promise of sound. She waited.

  “Before now,” he finally said. The two words were a concession.

  She held herself to one. “Yes.”

  “Another drunk stranger?”

  “Yes, I suppose he was.”

  “You came from his room?”

  “We were reading the Bible. Or he was. I was watching.” She moved closer to the doorway. Now she could make out the outline of his face.

  “There are better ways to seduce a girl.” He brought a beer bottle to his lips and then dropped the cigarette into its emptiness, where it hissed and died. “What he probably meant to do was this.” He leaned over and kissed Ing
rid softly on the lips. Cigarettes, beer, salt and, somewhere below these other flavors, the man. She closed her eyes as her body started to burn, wanting the kiss to last until she could taste only him. Before he moved his head away from hers he whispered, “You should probably try my room.”

  She was equal parts shock and desire. The most she could manage was an echo: “I probably should.”

  He closed the door behind them and they were in darkness, a crack of pale light at the bottom of the door. She wiped the palms of her hands on her skirt, knowing she should not have entered. Then she moved slowly forward in the darkness. “I won’t stay for long,” she said, though the darkness was delicious. “I have to be up and out by dawn.” She stepped toward where she thought he might be, no longer needing to see him, not caring who he was.

  It was not sex. He held her and she let herself be held until she could feel the breath move in his body. Then she started to touch him, moving her fingers lightly from his cheek to his neck to his shoulder, resting them finally on his chest. When he moved on top of her, she held his face in her hands and without taking off their clothes, they began pressing into each other, pressing so hard Ingrid felt the bruising bones meet—and still she pushed harder, her pelvis rising to meet him. She pulled his face to hers and laid her cheek against his until his stubble burned her skin. When she could no longer stand it, Ingrid rolled over and fit her back into his chest. “This is hard,” she said. “It is harder than it is strange.”