The Limits of the World

by Jennifer Acker

  5.

  [05 h: 41 m]

  Uhuru, they called it. The Africans won, and Europeans left in droves. We had nowhere to go. India offered only poverty, and Britain didn’t want us. Kenya had been the land of opportunity; now it was land of last resort.

  It was like the time, did I tell you about the time? The time a hippopotamus waded into the stream that fed the power turbine of Nairobi. The thing got stuck and plunged the whole city into darkness for days. But there were darker times to come.

  First came the bitterness. All these years, they think we are cheating them in our stores. Listen, everyone knows about Indian bargaining, but there was no convincing that we were not trying to fleece them. The Africans grumbled about our practices, accused us of using false weights, or writing in our own language so they could not follow. But we had traded with them back when the colonials ignored them, when the whites did not dare venture into the interior. Who had bought their beans and maize and beeswax? Who had sold them hoes to break the soil of their shambas? When people are poor, their memories and tempers are too short.

  In sixty-nine, the Africans revoked our trading licenses, our bread and butter. More of us left. Those who could slipped into Britain through the last skinny crack, those men who had accumulated funds in UK accounts. More than one hundred thousand people, you know? But I was too old to start over in a new country, my English limited even then to a few words. Who there would have accepted me as their burden?

  And still, most days feel like the ones before. We live our lives. We go to see Raj Kapoor in Sangam, and all the ladies talk for months about lips touching on the screen.

  And yet, on River Road, all over the city, agents are springing up, promising to help with immigration. Promises to get into UK, which had placed quotas on us. Talk was of the price of gold, the rate of pounds sterling and rupees on the black market. Tourists paid us in foreign currency—who knew what would happen to our shillings?

  Maybe you think, from where you both stand, inside your democracies, that this was the time to show political will. Become part of the system and work influence from the inside. After all, the professions and the trades, from lawyer and engineer to tailor and electrician, these were majority Asians. We had many jobs in public sector, too, but after the Africans took rule, they wanted their own in place. There was not the thought that Africans could advance and join us at these levels, but instead that we were standing in their way. They recalled the years of master-servant, and thought all masters must be removed.

  Asians had not been active in politics in the protectorate, never protested loudly against the colonials, and in this the Africans saw complicity. When they took power, they wanted total loyalty and nothing but. Dedication to their causes, forgetting our own. So if we cannot represent our true selves, what then is the point?

  At a party once, I met a man who was starting in politics. He was at the temple, maybe trying to raise some funds and pull us to his side. While he is there, we smile politely, but when he is gone, everyone says, Budhu! What he thinks he is doing?

  Communal representation by race, we used to have this. It wasn’t a good system, but at least our people spoke for themselves and most had the vote. These tiny advantages disappeared after independence. We get lost in these big parties that first and foremost must stand up for the African cause. You here, you think you are African? And you over there, American? You see? Indian first, no matter which place we call home.

  6.

  Once, during the sixty hours he was asleep, Amy opened the curtains to let the sunlight in. But all he remembered were shades of gray, shifting forms and shadows. That was daytime. At night, his dreams exploded in Technicolor. Nightmares on the plains, sausage trees hung with bodies, severed heads. He was chased and half devoured; beasts bit his legs and left him to bleed.

  Simama. Twende. Kioko’s voice teaching stop and go. Simama! Twende!

  He’d been feverish, Amy said, his temperature over 102. “At 103, I was taking you in.”

  The first day he was out of bed for more than a few hours, Amy made plain pasta with butter and salad for dinner. They sat at the table for an hour, then she scraped his uneaten food into a Tupperware. They watched TV. Amy drank beer and Sunil, Orange Crush, the childhood comfort that was now the only calories he could stomach. Her hair had grown down past her shoulders, tucked flat behind her ears, giving her a religious cast. Her face had lost its Kenya pink. She looked exhausted. Gently, she said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Numb. Tired.”

  “You know, you need to call James.”

  “I will.” Though it was the last thing on his mind.

  She nodded and rubbed something off her lips with her thumb. “My parents have been calling. You don’t have to talk to them, they don’t expect it, but they’re sad for you, concerned. They want to know if there’s anything they can do.”

  “They’re kind,” he said.

  “They’d give us a loan, I bet, if we asked. To tide us over.”

  He shook his head. “Not that. Not now.” The interest on their credit card had ballooned—he refused to speak to his mother about covering their tickets as she had originally promised—but being in debt to the Kauffmans was worse.

  “They also asked if there’s anything they can do for your mom.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. They should ask her.” He thought of his mother alone in their Columbus house; her feet silent on the blue carpet. Pacing blindly past the cola stain, letting the yard grass grow tall. Would she sell the place? Was she still working? She hadn’t called. At the funeral, when he’d taken her body to support her, to hold her, he’d called himself the other one. He’d meant it as joke, a moment of lightness. Complicit in the unusual past they now shared. But it had come out cracked and desperate, and now he saw that his statement had also been a trial, a test. She’d always thought of him as second. And in one revealing instant, she’d demoted him from other to total stranger. She’d been distraught, but her directive hadn’t come from nowhere. It had been lying beneath the surface for years. How could the Kauffmans understand that? How could Amy?

  Spring had passed them by and now it was summer, though the mornings and evenings were still cool. The distraction of basketball was over, leaving a gaping hole in the evenings. It was eight-thirty, just getting dark. Flickers from the TV on mute lit up their silence. The apartment still felt new to him. He could barely remember their brief days here before leaving for Nairobi—except for that call from his mother: the phone cord wrapped tightly around his wrist as she destabilized the foundation he’d once thought immutable.

  He motioned for Amy to move closer. She slid backward between his legs and leaned against his chest, rested the back of her head on his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her and felt her ribs. He held her until her breathing fell in with his and they were asleep.

  In the morning, Amy poured mango juice, which Sunil suddenly craved. It was expensive, but she insisted he needed the calories. Andrew and Erik were coming by, she said.

  “You’ve been talking to them?”

  “Sure. They’ve called. They’ve come over. They’re good friends.” Erik had brought several packages of Norwegian smoked salmon.

  Sunil saw in the full light of day that Amy had been busy while he was asleep. The apartment was very clean, the fridge stocked, her sneakers caked with mud. A stack of résumés and cover letters on a corner of the table.

  “So those jerks at the Welcome Group never contacted you? I thought that interview had gone really well.”

  Amy pulled her hair back into a ponytail and tied the drawstring of her running shorts. “It did. They offered me the job, but I couldn’t take it.”

  “What? When? In Nairobi?” She appeared so casual, he couldn’t understand what she had said. “That was your first choice.”

  “I know, it sucks. But there was nothing I could do.”
She kept her eyes on her bare feet. The nails were scuffed, dark with gray sock lint around the edges.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  They’d been halfway around the world, she said. She’d written back right away, hoping, and they were sorry, but it was too late.

  “You should have told me.” His fingers drummed the table. He stopped drumming. Shadows circled the bowl of peaches and melons. “It’s a big deal that your best prospect came and went, and you’re telling me now? Only because I asked?”

  She fetched her socks and shoes and shoved in her feet. Roped the laces into double knots. “Do you remember how on edge you were in Nairobi? Do you see how I might not have wanted to give you bad news?”

  On safari there’d been plenty of quiet moments when she could have told him. His mood, hers, that wasn’t supposed to matter. Was she scared to tell him, is that what she meant? The thought was foreign. He’d never come close to wondering that before. And now she’d made up her mind, unilaterally closed the discussion.

  He watched her leave the apartment, jog down the stairs, slam the front door, and course down the block, all before she even opened the door.

  “Show some self-respect,” Andrew said, when he came by to pick Sunil up. He pointed at his gym shorts in disbelief.

  “We’re only going for barbecue,” Sunil said, but he changed into real pants and pulled on a clean shirt.

  The unlikely three of them ambled down the street: brown, cream, and paper white. Andrew was the only one dressed decently, who carried himself upright and looked straight ahead. Sunil walked with his eyes on the ground, while Erik, in his own wrinkled button-down, ambled with his head in the clouds, as if scanning for birds.

  Andrew asked if Amy might go for a PhD if she had a hard time finding a job.

  “No, she says she’s done with school. She wants to do something useful.”

  “That makes one of us,” Erik said cheerfully, constitutionally unflappable.

  Then Erik and Andrew turned quickly to him, to his problem.

  “You can’t just quit at this point. You’ve put in four years of work already. The dissertation is all you have left,” Andrew said. “And you know what needs to be written.”

  “There’s no good reason not to see it through,” Erik agreed. “Pull yourself up by your Harvard bootstraps, man. We’re so lucky here—are you going to throw that away? Erase everything you’ve done?”

  Erase made Sunil think of his father. Vanished into the dust of another continent.

  “I want to see what you’ve written,” Erik said.

  “No. It’s not ready.”

  They stood in line at Fat Jerry’s, the air rich with fry and sweetness. Sunil was glad his feet stuck to the floor, because he felt light-headed. His stomach flipped, growled. They ordered ribs, pulled pork, coleslaw, collard greens, baked beans, cornbread. The trainee taking the order made some mistakes and called over the manager. College-aged, Indian, softly rounded face, she told Sunil her name. Smiled brightly with her American teeth. She asked where his family was from.

  “There are Indians in Africa?”

  He laughed, the first time in days. “Believe it.”

  The line built up behind him, but she kept her eyes on him. Her gaze felt good. He felt recognized, reconstituted. Deepa gave them three fat slices of pecan pie and helped carry their food to the table.

  Andrew pushed aside the plastic forks and pulled metal utensils out of a case in his shoulder bag. “Tell me about your breakthrough in Kenya. I know you had one because Lieberman told me. I guess you emailed her?”

  Sunil pressed fingers into his eyes. He saw what Andrew was doing. Fine. He would talk.

  He explained to them how, lying awake in the Ngama Hills (while Amy was asleep, while his father was still alive—in Sunil’s own mind), he’d imagined two columns, labeled Some Effect and No Effect. Those were the two options for the realist, the person who believes that we can know moral truths. Either the realist believes evolution has had some effect on our moral judgments, or he believes that evolution has had no effect. If he chooses no effect, he is driven toward scientific nonsense. If he chooses some effect, he is faced with total moral skepticism, or the claim of a totally implausible coincidence. When this formulation had occurred to him in the middle of the Mara night, he’d written it up quickly and emailed it to Lieberman. This dilemma created the more formal terms she had told him he needed for his dissertation.

  Andrew nodded, excited. “Yeah, so that’s pretty fucking insane. Are you saying all you’re left with is skepticism, which is just as debilitating as nihilism? Because skepticism and realism aren’t the only two views.”

  “The other two options are no good. Naturalism just changes the topic, and relativism is incoherent.”

  “See how provocative that is—you’ve boxed in the realist. You don’t finish this,” Andrew said, “someone else will hit upon it and he’ll get all the credit. You think you’re suffering now. Wait until you get scooped.” He rolled up his sleeves and piled more food on Sunil’s plate. “Eat. Amy said you’re starving yourself. We’re not going to let you turn into some boiled-egg-eating Berman. I won’t be friends with any Double-D.”

  Erik’s comically thin eyebrows peaked in concern. He said, “We are not joking. You have to finish.”

  The vertigo started when he left the apartment. Walking up the steps of Emerson Hall, his feet wet from the rain, he tried to imagine the other side: emerging from the meeting triumphant, ready to go on. Ready! He passed the classroom in which he’d substitute-taught for Bernardston, and felt a jittery almost-hope, arms and legs tingling in anticipation. If he could only get back there, back to the students, to puzzling through paradoxes and firing them up.

  James offered Sunil a bottle of Poland Spring and waited courteously for him to drink. Something about his office was different. A striking and unexplained absence. Several bookshelves had been cleared; half-packed boxes stacked on the floor. “Are you moving offices?”

  “I’ve been working from home more,” James said, his square face weary. “So I’ve shipped boxes to the house. Not that there’s space for them. Drives my wife crazy.”

  James nearly lived in his office. It had always comforted Sunil to know that in the case of a true philosophical emergency one of the best minds of the generation could be found at a moment’s notice. Sunil considered himself to be in the midst of a genuine philosophical crisis and was relieved to be here, immersed in James’s calm demeanor, his aura of permanence. But the missing books unsettled him. It was like Andrew wearing a dirty shirt.

  “I’m so sorry, Sunil, about your father.” James faltered. “Were you close?”

  This was the first personal question James had ever asked. He’d never even probed his ethnic heritage, or where he grew up. Like James’s steady office presence, his adviser’s lack of interest in Sunil as an individual proved the man’s seriousness, his intellectual purity.

  “Not very close, no. We did have a couple of good talks before he—was killed. And one that wasn’t so good.”

  “Well, that’s par for the course, I suppose.”

  Maybe James never asked personal questions because he didn’t know what to do with the answers. Maybe James relied on platitudes as much as anyone. Sunil removed the sheath of papers from his pack, ready to discuss his paper. He had written up his notes from Nairobi—not as much as he wanted, but something.

  But James sighed, looked at him with pained regret. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. I suppose you know you missed your deadline, the extension of your deadline. The department has met, and there are sufficient concerns about your progress to prevent us from funding you for the fall.”

  “But the deadline was just last week.” Or had it been the week before?

  “This final deadline was quite firm, which I mentioned before you left. I know you can’t
have been expected to produce anything since your father’s death, but you did have quite a generous amount of time before that. I feel terrible telling you at a time like this.” James removed his glasses and massaged the baggy skin under his eyes. “We hope you will sit in on classes—don’t disappear—but we can’t fund you until spring. And that, of course, is contingent upon significant progress—half or three-quarters of the dissertation. You’re working on a very promising idea. I hope you can find a way to continue—talking through it, writing. On the other hand, sometimes a semester off is helpful for students, releases them from some crippling anxiety, something I know a thing or two about.”

  The backlit vision of the classroom, of bright young versions of himself, of faces to talk to, blinked and fizzled out. Sunil gathered his things. He felt like fleeing but forced himself to slow, to adopt a modicum of dignity. But as he reached the common room, he felt it: the flapping, twisting panic of free fall, of complete fucking cluelessness.

  Lieberman’s office was empty, but a wet yellow slicker hung over a hook driven carelessly into the wall. Sunil waited in the chair she’d leaned back in and threatened to tip over the last time he was here.

  She entered the room still drying her hands on a paper towel. A few brown shreds clung to her palms.

  When she saw him she stopped, then jolted forward. “I’m sorry, Sunil. I’m so very sorry.” She reached out, as if to hug him, then thought better of it. Her hair was pulled back messily and held in place by a chewed pencil.

  “For what?”

  “About your father?”

  “Oh, of course. Thank you. Honestly, at first I thought you were saying you were sorry about my funding?”

  “Oh.”

  “You said—”

  “I defended your project, as much as I could. I used the email you sent from Kenya. But it was a hard case to make because you still do not have enough pages. But you will.” She peeled the wet towel off her hands and stuffed the damp ball into her pocket, pushed tangled strands away from her flushed face. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, the softest he’d ever heard it. “I’d like to help you.”