by Dave Eggers
Childhood: rarely the largest cross-section of a life, but the period that forms the duplicating pattern in the grain. I was beaten—badly—as a child. Once she yanked me up with such force my arm popped clear of its socket. I have been to a few shrinks since then and I have learned to be wary of peoples’ motives. Motive is just a gussied-up word for reason, and with some people it doesn’t take much. It was ungodly hot and the kids wouldn’t stop shooting those rubber bands, my mother, during one of her hearings, told the appellate.
I saw a medical intuitive once. He said he saw dark brown fetid knots in the parts of my body that needed to move the most: my knee and elbow joints, my ankles, the shoulder socket that was briefly relieved of its arm. He said the question I should be asking myself wasn’t, Why was I abused?, but What kind of person would choose to be an abused child? I was appalled. I had told him nothing, aside from my name and date of birth, before I entered the room. It took me days to sufficiently calm down enough to give his question serious thought. What kind of person? A person who believed—as my uncle was fond of saying—Life’s a bitch and then you die? No, that wasn’t it. Perhaps a person who was easily distracted, who thought life moved too fast to accomplish much? From my pain I had fashioned myself a tidy little Bastille with a full library and Moroccan rug. As much as I railed against it I was snug here. The pills made me feel detached and floating. They did nothing for the pain, but they made me not care so much that it was there. My dysfunction—and I know it is clearly just that: my dysfunction—afforded me the constraints I believed I needed to create.
Jonathan fit neatly into this program. My culture was so outside his purview—as was his, mine—that he was unaware that I was using. I could have told him that Americans must swallow twenty pills a day and he would have taken it as a citizenship requirement. Such was the permissive ignorant oasis of Cambodia: this is where people who knew better came to get away with things.
The Nigerian “President”’s language was becoming increasingly baroque with each passing day. When Jonathan and I went to him on Thursday to discuss Jonathan’s passport issue, Austin’s want of a burial was all Agbeze could speak of.
“It has been almost one week. Is our friend to be unhouseled? Is he to lack a sepulcher? Is his crypt a metal tray at the Cambodian hospital? No! He deserves eternal rest next to his mother and father. When their time comes,” he added hastily. Agbeze had just spoken to the bereaved, or so he told us, over a Skype connection at the nearby Internet cafe. “But who is to pay for this?”
The owner of Austin’s club team—despite it being known that he was also a partner in the new riverside casino—claimed the football team had no money to pay for a funeral, let alone repatriating the body. The family in Lagos was notified, and when it became apparent that they had no money either and would not consent to a cremation (as they were Muslim), Agbeze raised a further stink.
Who is to pay? This sounded like a question of a different sort. We had come to Agbeze tentatively—Jonathan with an unpleasant taste in his mouth—but he had said this was the only way. The three of us were now sitting at a table in the No Name, the restaurant at the African bar, soaking up our Egusi soup with white, doughy balls of fufu. A Khmer waitress in a No Money, No Honey baby-T shuttled pitchers of Angkor between rattan tables as a Lil Wayne video played overloud in the backdrop.
In the African bar there had been an attempt over the past few days to raise enough money for Austin’s burial at a local cemetery. When the Crown Royal bag finally reached our table I stuffed a ten-dollar bill deep within its velvet folds. I watched Jonathan quickly stuff a wadded up dollar into the collection bag and then pass the bag along. He looked embarrassed, but I knew he was holding onto every cent right now in light of his sudden issue.
After seeing a YouTube clip of him playing in a Thai match, an Australian soccer team had emailed a letter of invitation to Jonathan. The team, as of a couple months ago, was newly minted Premiere League and all they needed was for him to obtain a tourist visa to Australia for the audition. Once he got to Australia the team said they could arrange for the rest. So Jonathan had made an appointment at the embassy in Phnom Penh, where the interviewer flipped through his visa pages past the Thai visas, the Vietnamese visas, the Singapore visa, to the passport’s last remaining pages.
“This passport looks good,” the man said. “Your visa history is strong, but you can’t fly to Australia with only two pages left in this passport. You’re going to need to get a new one. After you’ve taken care of that, you can make another appointment and we’ll discuss the matter of the visa.”
The man had then tapped Jonathan’s papers together sharply and handed them back to him.
I think Jonathan must have felt a headache wincing on: the nearest Nigerian Embassy was in Kuala Lumpur. Unless he could get a Malaysian visa and fly to KL—and that would surely eat all of his money—everything would need to be arranged through a go-between. As for me, I was beginning to understand that Jonathan’s future pointed toward Australia. Late at night I tried to convince myself that this might be my destiny too, but all I had to go on was a birthmark, roughly the shape of the Australian continent, on my inner right thigh. Never mind Australian accents made me cringe or that when I tried to recall any Australian literature what came to mind were the dirty passages from The Thorn Birds. Still, it was more comforting to think of myself as having a mismatched destiny in a mismatched country with Jonathan than to think of myself as having no destiny at all.
“I’m sorry I only have small money to give to Austin,” Jonathan was saying to Agbeze—as if Austin was right now squatting outside the African bar with a plastic cup, begging for his dinner. “But I am having BEEG passport problem. I tell you, I just gave the police 600 dollars for my visa extension and now they are telling me I need a new passport. Time is pressing on me, Agbeze, and I cannot lose this opportunity. You say you look on me like a son, and I believe you, but I need you to think of me as your son now because I must ask for—”
“Where is the passport?” Agbeze interrupted. I thought he wouldn’t want to discuss it with him, not this week of all weeks, but the older man was right on the point, asking him to give it here. Jonathan began rummaging through his messenger bag and removing various articles, which he placed precisely on the table: a huge padded set of headphones swaddled in their own cord; rolled-up Adidas gym shorts; a navy blue Gideon’s Bible spotted in flecks of white paint; at last, the passport.
Agbeze took it from him and immediately began flipping through the visa pages, holding the passport up to the bar light to scrutinize each visa. When he turned to the I.D. page, he lingered on the photo. Sitting between the two men, I rocked my stool a few inches closer to Agbeze and lowered my head to peer at the photo beside him. There were the wide nose, long indulgent eyelashes and big lips curved up at the corners in a natural bow even though he wasn’t smiling—you have Buddha lips, I would often say to Jonathan.
I had never had a chance to grow accustomed to my boyfriend’s face. And if I was honest with myself, I think my initial attraction to Jonathan was because of this face. When I looked into it I saw great pain. And there was something I recognized in his pain that cleared my head with its sharpness, like jumping into a cold lake on a sweltering day.
When I looked up from the photo it was as if I was seeing clearly for the first time: at least a dozen African boys were congregated around three pitchers of beer; some were staring vacantly at the flat screen TV; others, text messaging. And this is when it hit me. The boy in the photo, this much younger version of Jonathan, could be any of them.
“I can make all the arrangements,” Agbeze said. His voice was measured, business-like: “but you must know this is not an inexpensive process. I will need to pass on the appropriate amounts to facilitate this, and we will have to mail your photo and paperwork to Malaysia as well as courier the new passport back.” Agbeze paused. “The cost of all of this is usually $1,400, but I can give you a special price—a c
onsideration. Perhaps we can take care of this for $950?”
This is when Jonathan lifted one last item out of his bag—a dogeared envelope, from which he took out eight bills all with the improbable face of Ulysses S. Grant.
“This is the best I can do for now. Please Agbeze. I am praying to my God that he will see me out of this situation.” (I had never detected this note before in Jonathan’s voice, this beseeching.) “I will do everything in my power to get you the rest of the money. But I need my passport now. The police are on my back and they could deport me like that”—Jonathan snapped his fingers and looked over at me—“and then what would happen to my girl? We have a life together—not in Delta State, not in Sydney—we have a life together, here, in Phnom Penh. It’s not just my own life I’m asking you for.”
Agbeze tapped the 400 dollars into his wallet; then looked hard at me and smiled. “You are lucky you have a woman who sees you through the hard times, no?”
I thought I detected a note of condescension in this—some cold draft of insincerity in the older man’s tone.
Well. The money in the envelope was mine. In fact, I had just withdrawn my maximum daily limit from the ATM, but this much was none of Agbeze’s business. I sat there with my lips pursed, trying to think of something to say. In the meantime, Agbeze palmed Jonathan’s passport.
“I’ll see what I can do.” We both watched as he slipped the passport into a long manila folder and then rose from the table. “Excuse me, Jonathan—Miss,” he said to me. The word hissed off his tongue. “I need to visit the washroom.”
Rumors spread about Austin’s death. That at the time of the match, he had not eaten in three days. That he wasn’t even signed to the team and had been playing for free. That the skinny Khmer girlfriend who keened shamelessly at his funeral was pregnant by him. That he had been forced, by a cruel kind of economy, to pedal a bicycle the forty-five minutes to Olympic Stadium to and from practice each day, returning in rush hour traffic with a gauze surgical mask over his mouth and one arm held out to shield his eyes from the glare and the carbon monoxide.
That he had been poisoned.
The last theory was the most disturbing, but I had overheard all of them being bandied about at the bar at one point or another by the legions of African boys who said they were footballers, but as far as I could tell had no profession besides chain-smoking.
I was waiting for Jonathan to meet me at the African bar on Thursday, before our business with Agbeze, when a long-limbed boy approached me at the bar and immediately began fumbling with a crumpled pack of cigarettes.
“Do you smoke?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I said, thinking he meant marijuana. But he offered me a cigarette. “Oh no, no thank you,” I said, shooing it away and crossing my legs. “I quit.”
“I thought you said you smoke?” He looked at me reproachfully.
“Not cigarettes.” There was something unsettling about him. I was constantly being hit on by men who were ridiculous; some en ergy in me must have leapt out and met the aggrieved, the thespians, the men who lingered on their own reflections in store windows and tripped over obstacles in the street. He said his name was Freedom, and helped himself to the stool next to me.
“Me, I love to smoke. Cigarettes. Hookah. Blow smoke. Take a slow drag. After sex.” As he confessed he looked up at me, from lazy lowered cat’s eyes. “Where are you from?”
“The U.S.,” I said, craning my neck to look past his shoulder to the tables crowding the bar. I felt eyes on me while we were talking, but none of them belonged to anyone I knew.
“Ah, an American.” He leaned back, shook his head. “You are very, very lucky. I would like to visit your country someday.”
I needed to grab control of the conversation and move on. “So where are you from?”
“Hah! Don’t you know?” he snorted. “Are you not living in this country?”
“Well, I assume you’re from Nigeria, yeah. But you never know. You could be Cameroonian and then I’ve offended you.” I took a sip from the straw bobbing up and down in my bottle of soda water. “Do you like it here?”
“It’s okay.” He shifted his body weight. “I’m stuck here until I can play again.” At this he motioned toward the floor—he was wearing baggy shorts to his knee—and I noticed, for the first time, a white bandage swaddled around his leg, mid-calf. “A Cambodian did this to me. A stupid ass,” he added darkly.
“Is it a football injury?”
“Yeah.” I peered down at it, into the gloom of the scuffed tile floor. It didn’t look like any sports injury I’d ever seen.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You see this player, he put his leg out”—Freedom flexed his good leg and held it out from the bar stool—“and he tripped me. It was—how do you say?—purposeful. The Cambodian ref he didn’t do nothing.” The boy snorted. “What can you do with these kind of people? They have no rules, no education. My brother warned me this could happen. He said, these people you’re playing with, they’re uncivilized. They can do anything to you and nothing will happen to them—you’ll see.” He paused a second, as if contemplating whether or not to continue. “This never would have happened to me in any other league.”
“What did you sprain?” I pressed him.
“That muzzle, uh”—he pronounced “muscle” muzzle—“that muzzle that runs down the back of your leg. I think it’s called hamstring.”
“Your hamstring is above your knee,” I pointed out. Jonathan was late, Agbeze hadn’t shown his face yet, and I was not feeling generous.
“You know what I’m saying,” Freedom rejoined. He was looking at me strangely. “He injured me, okay? Now that I can’t play my team stopped my paychecks. What else am I supposed to do here?” He leaned in conspiratorially and spoke his next words softly, transferring his left hand to my thigh: “Just look around this room and tell me”—he squeezed my leg—“what else am I supposed to do?”
The passport had been with the President for ten days and there had been no new developments aside from Jonathan having to fast talk his way out of two new police raids on his all-male, all-Nigerian living situation with only a color copy of his passport and visa page, which I had scanned and printed out at my office, to present to the immigration police. On Saturday morning I awoke to Jonathan’s ringtone: harsh, tinny notes of Lady Gaga. I felt him searching under his pillow for the phone. When I opened my eyes he was folded mantis-like with his knees tucked under his chin at the edge of the bed, pinching his phone to his ear with his shoulder and pulling on his shoes.
“I told you that’s all the documents I have, man—I gave you everything I had last week!”
Agbeze, I thought and rolled over, groaning as I twisted the pillow around to cover my head.
“I’m with my girl right now, okay? Why can’t you tell me over the phone?”
There was a barrage of rapid-fire pidgin from Jonathan’s end: “Okay, okay. Five minutes, okay?” He cut the phone and turned to me, tugging the sheets down over my ass and grabbing a handful of my flesh. “My Sexy,” he said, “my Mary J. Blige. Pardon me, okay? I’ve got to meet Agbeze—I’ll be a few minutes, just a few minutes okay?”
“Where’re you going?”
“The Laos Embassy—it’s just up the street.”
“Why the Laos Embassy?” I was vaguely annoyed; why did everything with Jonathan have to be a non sequitur?
“I’m meeting him in front, okay baby? I think he needs to hand me some forms. I’ll come right back, okay?”
He didn’t appear worried and so I settled back on my side, gathering the sheets around me. He dropped down on bended knee beside the bed, kissed the tip of his own index and middle finger with a loud, juicy smack and then touched it to my lips. He then kissed his fingers again and reached for my face, using his fingertips like a brush to paint an imaginary diagonal across each of my cheekbones. It was a silly ritual between us. At last he planted a final finger kiss on my forehead and, lean
ing his head back theatrically with the flat palm of his hand tapping against his pursed lips, let out an Indian war whoop: WAH WA WA WAH WA WA WA WAH!
Jonathan, when he was a teenager, had lived through a tribal war in which he saw many people beheaded—“heads rolled—literally,” he was fond of saying; the war whoop was another of his favorite jokes. As he closed the door, he poked his head into the bedroom one last time and batted his eyelashes: “Red Indian kisses, baby, Red Indian kisses.”
When I woke up I had no idea what time it was. A flat white light was leaking in at the edge of the curtains. It could have been 10 A.M.; it could be two in the afternoon. I staggered to the bathroom to pee and my legs stung with the usual nerve pain from the Fibro—it took a little while to get them going. As I walked through the kitchen I noticed that the metal security door was ajar.
“Jonathan?”
Nothing. I swung open the door and stepped out onto the balcony.
He was sitting on the steps of the fire escape with his giant headphones on and when he looked up at me I could see that his eyes were wet.
“Baby, what’s wrong?”
“Agbeze lost my passport.”
“Excuse me?” I had and hadn’t heard him: I was thinking about my pills, which I had left in my bedroom, on the nightstand. There would be no going back for them now.
“He lost it. MY LIFE ABROAD. He leaves MY LIFE on his desk! Wait—I take that back. He doesn’t even know where he left MY LIFE.”
“Oh baby . . . ” I clambered down the steps to sit beside him. “How could that be? What did he do with it?”
“That’s why he had to meet in person. To tell me. I was so ANGRY, baby—I could have ripped up the roots of trees! I said to him, I give you MY LIFE and you leave it on your desk for anyone to pick through?”
With this he gathered the fingers of one hand into a point and made a twisting motion at his temple: “I say to him, Are you PSYCH?”