The Laughing Monsters: A Novel

by Denis Johnson

  I reached a slick soft spot I couldn’t skirt unless I ranged far into the wood. I sidled left along its edge and came to a sucking, lethal-looking red-and-yellow mudhole sprouting dead limbs around its border. In such a pit anything might be drowned. I shrugged off the pack and opened it at my feet. I set aside my papers and cash, and the map, and the water. I gripped one strap and spun myself to get the pack whirling and let it fly ten meters. It slapped the surface, skidded, rolled slowly under.

  My Timex said it was 6:17 on the twenty-sixth of October. Five days, nine hours left in which to find my way to Freetown. Plus an hour I’d pick up changing time zones. I unstrapped the watch from my wrist and pitched it underhanded into the muck.

  Five thousand kilometers. One hundred thirty hours.

  I drank down a liter of water as I stood there, tossed the bottle, kept the other, which wouldn’t stay with me much longer. While the pack sank with anything metal—penlight, camp knife, phony kilos, the lot—I removed my shirt and used it as a bindle for the rest. I thought about tossing away my belt with its suspicious metal buckle, considered also the buttons on my shirt and trousers, realized I might as well go naked—what certainty would it bring? There’s always something more to be rid of. Something inside.

  * * *

  I wondered about Michael. I expected him to turn up at my side having lingered in the area all this time, watching for some sign of me or of Davidia. As soon as I thought of him, there he was, Michael, crouched at the base of one of these tall trees just ahead—but it wasn’t Michael. Only a termite berm. As the day came on it revealed many more such berms feeding on the eucalyptus, and I thought I saw blurry figures or ghosts crouched in the grove, watching me, and soon the woods were full, indeed, of people moving among the trees and poking slender sticks into the mounds, harvesting the white ants. I was joined on the way now by dozens of mud-spattered, stately women balancing baskets on their heads, taking the insects to the market. None of them spoke. They had the manner of ghosts. Possibly one of them had sprung from the corpse of the woman we’d struck down in Uganda. But their feet padded on the clay. I heard them breathing.

  I followed them out of the woods and into Darba, a town without electric light, without even useless wires, just old power poles broken at the tops like huge dead stalks. The place materialized around us in a haze of cook-smoke, a city of sturdy French colonial buildings without panes in the windows or doors in the doorways, concrete husks into which people had moved their animals while they made shanties of twig and adobe for themselves in the yards.

  I stopped at a café, really a tent. I gave the barman a twenty-dollar bill and he left me sleeping on my face at his only table while his small daughter looked after the establishment.

  I woke when a guy came in flying on what looked like the greatest drug ever made. He was speaking in tongues, his feet didn’t touch the floor, he was just being lugged around by his smile; it turned out he was merely drunk on a few baggies’ worth of “spirits” branded, in this case, as Elephant Train.

  I bought him another and another, and as many for myself. When I asked him if he spoke English, he said, “Super English.”

  “Where is Newada Mountain?”

  “You need to go La Dolce.”

  “How do I find La Dolce?”

  “Go to Newada Mountain.”

  “No. No. Ou est La Dolce?”

  “La Dolce!” I heard the two Italian words, though he might have said Ladoolchee.

  “Is La Dolce near Newada Mountain?”

  “She is the mother of Newada Mountain.”

  “A person? A woman? Une personne? Une femme?”

  “Yes. The mother. Oui. La mère. Oui.”

  Elephant Train. I spread out my Congo map, and together we searched for Newada Mountain as we bit into many packets and sucked down the contents, but the map got smaller and Congo grew larger, and soon we were lost.

  The barman returned and presented me with a pair of slip-on jogging shoes, blue in color, a pair of black denims called El Gaucho, and a yellow T-shirt with a woman’s brown face on it. Who is the woman? I said, and he said, Très jolie! I said, Oui oui. He gave me my change in Ugandan shillings. I said, No Congo francs? and he said, Le franc?—c’est merde.

  When I asked about Newada Mountain he said, It’s there, pointing north, but I don’t know how to get there. Go to the coffin maker. He’s going to Newada. He’s next to the church.

  Yes, I see the church.

  He’s going to Newada Mountain. Follow the coffin maker.

  The clock on the post stretched its hands out sideways, nine-fifteen. I’d walked for five hours, slept for one. Spent another getting drunk. Out back of the café I found a dry spot of earth to stand on among the puddles, and got myself into the new wardrobe. The jeans and T-shirt sagged quite a lot; the blue shoes fit perfectly over my grimy socks.

  * * *

  Behind the Église du Christ I found a man, a very small one, perhaps of the Mbuti, one of the Pygmy groups, dressed in a sports shirt and clean trousers and shiny plastic sandals. He stood with his hands on a green bicycle, rolling it backward and forward as if to check its worthiness. I said, “Are you the coffin maker?” He didn’t understand. I tried to remember the French word for coffin but I never knew it in the first place. Somebody called to him, he abandoned me for a fool, and I followed him as he walked his bike along the crumbling tarmac street.

  On sawhorses out front of his lean-to rested five bright purple coffins, two of them, I’m afraid, quite short. These were the two he was concerned with. He parked his bike’s rear tire on a notched block to steady it and mounted both coffins—equal in length, about a meter—sideways behind the seat and fastened them down with black rubber straps, which he tightened and yanked and tightened again.

  He high-stepped over the bar of his conveyance and straddled it while he rolled it free of the block and set his feet on the pedals. For a moment he stood in the air, then descended as he produced a forward motion. He knew I was watching. I don’t think he liked it.

  I followed some distance behind him, out of the town and into a small rain, then under a hot blue sky. The tarmac ended in a fog of red dust out of which the vast faces of speeding lorries exploded one after another, saying I AM LOST—TOUT AU BOUT—REGRETTE RIEN—coming within half an inch of touching us, as if some superstition required it. I lost him in the choking clouds until he left the highway for a sidetrack, and I glimpsed a bit of purple a quarter mile off to my right.

  For some time I floated along like a marionette. I had no reason for believing these two small coffins were headed for Newada Mountain. We had the sun traveling toward our left, and therefore, it seemed, this track took us north, and north felt reason enough to be doing anything—that is, some particle of my memory put Newada to the north of where I’d first entered Congo with Michael and Davidia.

  I had no problem keeping up, as he stopped often to get his strength. On the upward slopes he got off and walked his bike, and I pulled ahead of him. I never said hello or the like. My shoes held up, though my socks were falling to pieces. No blisters. The bottoms of my heels felt raw, but only slightly.

  About three hours along, many kilometers from the highway, the green bike’s rear tire went flat—perhaps owing to some sabotage, as the puncture happened in front of an establishment consisting of a bench and a bicycle pump, open for business, which business was tire repair. The repairman pried the tire loose from its rim, pulled out the inner tube, and went about patching it with a remnant cut from another inner tube.

  While this went on I had the sense to find a kiosk and buy a bag of breadrolls and some candles and matches and two liters of water and a yellow number-two pencil and a small kitchen knife wrapped, for safety’s sake, in newspaper. I paid with a five-thousand-shilling bill, and the proprietor and his wife shuttered their store and went to canvass their neighbors for the balance. They hadn’t returned before the coffin maker set out again.

  As far as I know, duri
ng the rest of the journey, as much as fifteen kilometers, I believe, the bearer of the coffins took no water. I ate my bread and drank down my two liters and then started dying of the drunkard’s thirst.

  I let him blaze the trail into another spell of rain and out again. We entered open farmland. In the mud, the tread-prints of goats and barefoot humans. The wet fields shone hard enough to burn my eyes. We passed boys as they stopped hoeing to throw themselves down in the corn rows with their arms flung wide and their chins in the dirt, praying toward Mecca, but they sounded like coyotes howling. Just afterward, the coffins disappeared over a rise, and when I’d climbed to the top I looked across a landscape of rolling hills and silhouettes—the lumps of huts, a few skeletal, solitary trees, and three cell phone towers with much the same lonely and distinguished aspect, one in the north, two others beyond it in the northwest.

  The coffin maker, already free of his cargo, charged back down the way he’d come. I moved to block his way. He skidded to a stop and leaned on his handlebars, tipping his bike to the side with one short leg outstretched and a toe on the ground, and when I asked him if this was Newada Mountain, he spoke his first words to me, saying, “Oui, c’est Newada,” and kicked off again, gaining speed down the hill, and I gathered he’d reach the wider road before full dark. A bit along in his descent he turned his head and spoke once more, calling, “—le lieu du mal!” which I think means the bad or the wrong or the evil place.

  * * *

  ATTENDEZ EN ANGLAIS:

  FINDER PLEASE DELIVER THIS MATERIAL TO

  THE UNITED STATES MILITARY GARRISON

  NEAR DARBA, CONGO

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN (US MILITARY PERSONNEL):

  PLEASE FORWARD ATTACHED MATERIAL TO

  DAVIDIA ST. CLAIRE

  C/O GARRISON CMDR COL. MARCUS ST. CLAIRE

  US 10TH SPEC FORCES, FT. CARSON, COLORADO, USA

  WITH GRATITUDE—KAPTAJN ROLAND NAIR (CAPT.)

  JYDSKE DRAGONREGIMENT, HRN (ROYAL DANISH ARMY)

  [OCT 27 ca. 12AM]

  Davidia,

  I wish I could record this silence. It’s like the bottom of the sea. In silence like this, my head makes its own noise—I can hear the moon, I can hear the stars. Once in a while a sick child croaks in one of the huts.

  (I started to write this a couple of hours ago. I lit a candle, but the flame drew the nocturnal insects, including a moth big as a sparrow that batted out the flame in its forays and then crashed at my feet with its paraffin-spattered wings on fire and lay there flailing and burning for several minutes—all because of its infatuation … And then I saw the half moon coming up, so I’ve waited for its light to write by, sitting in the doorway of this hut. I’m guessing as to time of day, but the moon’s been waxing fatter and rising later and I remember it rose around ten pm when last I owned a watch.)

  I won’t bother catching you up. Someday I’ll attach this to a full account. I’ll wrap it all in brown paper and tie it with string and plunk it in a DHL pouch addressed to you, or to Tina Huntington. Which of you am I writing to?

  To you, Davidia. Just letting you know (should only this fragment reach you) that as of the date above, I was still alive.

  For the third time in ten days, I’m a captive—not held by others, but stuck, no option for movement. In my universe, time and space converge on 3 pm Nov 2nd at the Bawarchi Restaurant in Freetown—remember the Bawarchi?—5000 kilometers and 112 hours from here and now. Not a clue how to get there.

  I have some candles and matches, but as I say—the crashing bugs. I’ve got paper and pencils and a knife. The clothes on my back. 720 US dollars. 60K Ugandan shillings. No credit cards or plane tickets, no passport, no documented actuality. No pills against malaria. Every day, more African.

  I think when the wind shifts I may be hearing the brook at the bottom of the hill, or people down there laughing, or weeping.

  Several hours ago, Davidia, at dusk, I climbed this hill and arrived at the village of New Water Mountain. I stood among a couple dozen huts. No mountain visible. Hooves and feet had beaten the hilltop’s ground into a flat, muddy waste. The only splashes of color came from yellow twenty-liter water jugs—they lay all around. And two bright, child-size purple coffins. Beside the coffins, two old men scraped at the ground, one with a hoe, one with a spade, both men barefoot but wearing long sleeves and trousers.

  Nearby, a man and a woman seemed to be taking apart one of the dwellings, removing its thatch, setting the materials aside. The woman stopped, laid her head back, and put her face to the sky—I expected a mournful howl, but she only trembled a bit, then settled her mind, it seemed, and returned to the work.

  A giant leafless tree, an arthritic-looking horror, dominates the vicinity from the top of the rise (I can hear it creaking in the breeze right now as I write). Four people stood at the tree’s base, hallooing up toward the highest branches like hounds. One of them, a white woman, met me as I approached, and she said, “Are you wondering where the chickens went?”—I said I wasn’t—“And the goats? They’re all dead. And most of the children. Dead. Are you lost?”—I said a little—“You look disturbed.”—She meant drunk. I said I was.

  She’d walked among several villages with these others, two women and a sturdy-looking man with a machete on his shoulder, all Africans. She alone was white—white and plump, probably in her thirties—and grimy from hiking, but hale and upright.

  I said, “Jesus, I know you.”

  “You know Jesus?”

  “I saw you at the White Nile Hotel, didn’t I? You were swimming in the pool.”

  “My husband Jim and I are from the North East Congo Mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.”

  “I had the impression it was something like that.”

  “It’s the Lord’s work,” she said, “but every day you want to kill somebody.”

  The man with the machete said, “We must go, Mom.”

  “I know. I just said so.”

  She told me her husband had spent the day in Darba trying to find someone from the Ministry of Health so they could get some action up here. “Or the Red Cross or somebody. What a laugh. But we have to try.”

  “What about Doctors Without Borders?”

  “He’ll check with them too, but they like to stay close to Bunia for supplies. Close to the airfield. And the brothels. We call them Doctors Without Pants.”

  The woman continually waved her hands and flicked her fingers as if battling with cobwebs, and I feared for her sanity as much as mine. She said, “We’ve looked at three other villages in the last two days. It’s the same thing for fifty kilometers around. The people are crazy, the water is poison, everybody’s dying. We’ve convinced them to evacuate—all but this bunch. They’ve got a queen who rules them from the treetop. Come over here and you can look.”

  We joined the others. Several meters above us, between two large boughs, a chair was hanging. We could see the bottom of the chair, and a pair of feet, in white tennis shoes, dangling below it, and in the boughs above the chair were bunches of thatch, evidently to protect the owner of the feet.

  “She won’t come down till morning, but we can’t wait for that. We’re meeting the reverend in Kananga. It’s two kilometers down that path. Or more.”

  The feet up above seemed quite still. “Is she asleep?”

  “I don’t know what she is. Are you gold, or hydrocarbons?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Are you with one of the companies? Which particular corporation?”

  “None. I’m here looking for a friend of mine, but I haven’t spotted him. Or much of anybody, actually.”

  We stood on a patch of brown earth littered with corn husks and cassava peelings. To the west I saw a couple of distant cell towers, lone trees, many huts—all in two dimensions, flat against the sunset. In the other direction, everything was bathed in a somber metallic light, and the two child coffins, ten steps away, seemed uniquely purple, a purple without precedent. Beside them, the two old digge
rs had nearly disappeared into the earth. I went over and looked. The margin between the twin graves had crumbled to make a single large hole. As they smoothed its sides with their tools, the men sloshed up to their ankles in muddy seepage, maybe the very stuff that had killed the poor tots.

  She said, “Usually when somebody dies they do a big wake with a lot of howling and drumming, but they’ve had too many, and now it’s just a chore. The whole region is toxic, thanks to the lust for precious metals. This is the outworking of a spiritual travesty. Are you any kind of believer?”

  “No.”

  “We’re getting out of here day after tomorrow, and I am Goddamn glad.”

  “How are you traveling?”

  “Walking, for now. Jim has the Trooper. We’ll make one more swing through the villages, and then back to Lubumbashi. We’ll take a plane from Bunia.”

  “Look,” I said, “if I find my friend, we’ll need a ride out of here. I don’t mind paying, and I don’t mind begging.”

  “It depends on how many come in the car. Where are you going?”—I said I didn’t know—“Any decent hotel, am I right?”—I said yes—she recommended Bunia. “There’s quite a bit of UN activity there. Peacekeepers and such. It’s a UN town.”

  “How far away is Bunia?”

  “A couple hundred kilometers. It’s the nearest airstrip. The UN uses it, and some charters.”

  “Please, ma’am. Please. We don’t need seats. Put us on the roof. Really. This is Africa.”

  She thrilled me by saying, “We’ll probably come right through here day after tomorrow. We’ll do our best to take you aboard. Look for a blue Isuzu Trooper with the top painted white.”

  “I’ll be looking for it, believe me.”

  “In the meantime, you’ll meet the queen. Maybe they’ll elect you king.”

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “After a while,” she said, “everything’s funny.” For one second—I think because of her bright anger—she seemed sexy. She turned to her friends. “Next is Kananga. Only a couple of miles, yes?”