The Laughing Monsters: A Novel

by Denis Johnson

Also my pencil must be dull, but come on, enough—it worries the mind and body to have to sharpen a utensil every half page.

  Oudry, Geslin, and Armand have kindled a fire from dried dung on a bed of former thatch, and our laughter flies up into the blackness with its sparks.

  Incidentally, Davidia, that’s why they’re tearing the huts apart around here. For firewood.

  Davidia, I wish you could meet Tina.

  Tina, I’m not sure I’d like you to meet Davidia.

  Do I contradict myself? Not to worry. I’ll soon be transcribing these notes in a prison cell, with plenty of time to get my thoughts in order.

  Let’s face it. I’ve got to go back to the Yanks.

  I’ve improved the plan a bit: take the last of my cash to Bunia, lavish it on a finale of booze and prostitutes, then advise the UN to arrest me.

  * * *

  Fifty kilometers in 14 days. Per my calculations, a circus clown walking on his hands would have made better progress.

  Tina.

  You’re sexy, Tina. And smart. But not glamorous in the Michael’s-woman way. Still. You might have had dealings with Michael. I think you might have dealt with him. You know what I mean? I mean, did you fuck him, Tina? I always suspected you did but I never asked, so I’m asking. Did you fuck Michael?

  [OCT 28 ca. 8AM]

  When next I encountered Michael Adriko, I found him continuing in a wretched state. He looked like he’d been beaten about the face with a bat, but it was just sadness, only misery, it was nothing physical, it was all from the inside. That was last night.

  A few words about remorse.

  This remorse twists in me like seasickness.

  If you’ve been seasick lately you know what I mean. This remorse is physically intolerable.

  I climbed the hill last night after drinking with my fellow herdsmen. What are their names? God. I’ve lost their names—and the herdsmen as well, and their cattle. Where are they? I’m alone by the creek.

  There’s a reason they call them spirits. They enter in, they take control, they speak and walk around. Wicked, wicked spirits.

  Last night I thought I heard Michael chopping with his machete atop this hill. Striking at La Dolce’s tree and calling, Nair! with every stroke, Nair! Nair!

  It must have been well past midnight, because the moon rode high and gave plenty of light to see by. I floated zigzag up the hill and now report I was hallucinating. Nobody was bothering the tree.

  Michael sat against its base with his legs splayed before him and his machete sticking upright at the midpoint between his feet, his arms limp beside him, his chin on his chest—in Kandahar I once saw a man sitting exactly like that, and he was dead.

  I said, “I don’t care if you’re awake, or dead, or what.”

  “I’m defeated, that’s all.”

  “We need to go, man. What’s keeping you here?”

  “Something has to happen that hasn’t happened.”

  “What could possibly happen?”

  “Davidia might come.”

  “Davidia’s not coming. She was disgusted right down through. She didn’t look back, Michael. Not one glance.”

  “I put her to too harsh a test.”

  “Did you think you’d be the king here, and Davidia would reign beside you as queen?”

  “You’re making my experience sound shallow. You’re wrong. This is cutting me very deep. I never meant to keep her here. No, I only meant to bring my wedding to these people as a great gift, and then leave. I always meant for us to leave.”

  “Leave how?”

  “There’s always a plan for extraction. How many times have I told you that?”

  “What plan? Who extracts us?”

  “In this case, we extract ourselves.”

  “Then let’s do it. For God’s sake, Michael.”

  “What are you made of, Nair? Why did you betray us?”

  “Will you leave it for another time? Let’s get out of here, if you know a way.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Come and have some Mawa with these folks down the hill. Let’s relax, and talk this over.”

  He wouldn’t respond. I walked away in the hope he’d hop up and follow me, as a dog might.

  The truth was that we’d finished the Mawa to the last molecule and sopped up all the dregs. For this reason, if I had an errand in walking away, I forgot it.

  My feet turned me around, and I stood over Michael once again. “Very good, sir. What’s happening?”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Let’s talk a little bit about betrayal.”

  “You’re an expert.”

  “There’s betrayal, and there’s betrayal.”

  “So far I can’t argue with you.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Go away.”

  “Gladly.”

  I repeated the same business—I had no control over my words or my deeds. The spirits possessed me. Down the hill became up the hill, and I’m back at him.

  “Before I go, I just want to say goodbye to the biggest idiot I’ve ever known.”

  “Goodbye then. You won’t get far.”

  “I’m resigned to that. Let the Yanks play with me awhile. I’m headed for prison.”

  “What do they care about you, really?”

  “Do you think you’re the only idiot with criminal secrets and idiotic criminal scenarios, who does idiotic things?”

  “You’re raving. If I had some rope, I’d tie you.”

  “I’m going to the bottom of the hill and start waiting for these missionaries. They’ve got a car.”

  “Excellent. Maybe you’ll pass out, and they’ll run you over.”

  The spirits carried me down the hill once more. Demons. Vandals. Fiends. This time a sense of calm overcame me, a desperate counterfeit sobriety in which I realized I’d better talk clearly and persuasively to this stupid asshole.

  Michael was actually on his feet when I returned.

  “Hey. Where are you going?”

  “Don’t follow me.”

  “I forgot what I wanted to say before. It’s just this: there’s some business in Freetown I need to conclude in something of a hurry.”

  “In a hurry? Where do you think you are?”

  “I’ve negotiated the sale of some material,” I said, “and the handoff’s in Freetown with no fallback, and I’m afraid the deadline has gotten very tight. Thursday afternoon.”

  “What’s got you so mad for it? Is there money in this?”

  “Until the window closes. Can we get to Freetown?”

  “There are UN flights out of Bunia.”

  “How can we get on a flight?”

  “Money and luck.”

  “I think we’d better try. Otherwise I’m in a lot of trouble. Yesterday a fellow promised me hell.”

  “The promise was true.”

  “He meant I couldn’t last on the run, I’ll end up turning myself in, and you’re right about that much—the promise is true. What else can I do but give myself up? Help me.”

  “Not now. Go sleep it off.”

  “Goddamn it! You said you had a plan. Oh, well. I’d be a liar if I said I ever actually believed you—I’d be a liar.”

  “That’s exactly what you are. A liar.”

  “Wait. I’m sorry. Wait.”

  “I said don’t follow me.”

  I called him a cowardly little wog, and a black-ass nigger.

  “Shall I knock you down?”

  “I’ll get up, you nigger. I’ll get up, and I’ll keep coming.”

  “You’re trying to hurt me. And that hurts me.”

  And me. He was, after all, the only man in whose embrace I’d spent the night, more than once, on the cold desert ground outside Jalalabad one November, and in the strength of his arms I grew warm, I rested, I slept … I said, “Goddamn you for a fucking coon.”

  “Fine. Go ahead. That’s fine.”

  “I know every word for you. My mother’s people liv
e in Georgia. They still fly the rebel flag over there.”

  “Fine, fine. You forget I spent time in North Carolina.”

  “Fort Bragg, that’s right. Fort Carson. Every American fort there ever was.”

  “I’ve seen those Confederate flags.”

  In the orange moonlight he looked down at his feet, really examined them, lifting one and then the other, and it occurred to me I could get in a couple of good blows while he let this pointless business distract him, I could pretty well box his ears. I must have tried it, because I found myself with the breath knocked out of me and white streaks rocketing around the corners of my head. Sucking at a vacuum, it felt like.

  “Aren’t you going to get up? I heard you say you’d keep coming.”

  My mouth and nose were in the mud. The demons made no reply.

  He knelt beside me and stuck his blade in the ground one millimeter from my ear. I thought he might finish me off quietly with a chokehold.

  “This is why you never got promoted beyond your captain rank. Your childish temper.”

  [OCT 30 NOON]

  Davidia, and Tina—

  If this communication has come to you raw, before I’ve had a chance to transcribe these notes properly—or blend them with my someday semi-honest account—then you see the ink. No more pencils. You see my hand is sturdy. You’re looking at a fresh page.

  You guess my fortunes have turned. In which direction, I’ll tell you in a minute. This much for now: I’ve had a meal or two, and a wash at a sink, and I’m wearing new clothes. Let me finish the story.

  After the fight with Michael, I slept facedown on the ground.

  In the morning, Michael woke me gently. He said, “How was the night?”

  He seemed very different. He had a liter of delicious bottled water for me to drink. As soon as its mouth touched mine, I drained it away.

  The sky was gray through and through. The air seemed soft. Nothing stirred. I wondered if the clan had all died in the night, all of them at once.

  When I was able to stand, Michael led me to a part of the creek where I could bathe in it up to my chest with my clothes on, African style. It looked like a genuine creek—a rapids and small falls—a place where folks might come to cool off and to draw good water; but the water was bad, and nobody came.

  The clouds blew off and the morning sky turned blue. I came back to life and noticed some gaunt cows and even a couple of young goats pushing their noses around on the earth nearby. I lay out on a warm flat rock in the sunshine. Michael sat beside me, smoking—how, I’d like to know, does he produce cigarettes out of thin air?

  At this point I noticed that my head ached and that I felt, all around, unhappy. Here’s a confession: I’d puked while unconscious, and I’d lain all night facedown in my own sick. If I’d passed out while lying on my back I’d have drowned in it, and my labors would be done, but no such luck. Meanwhile Michael was saying:

  “Life is short. But the time is long. I look back, I see so much, my childhood…”

  While I lay in a woozy stew of crapulence—that is an actual word—Michael told me what he’d been doing since his escape from the Congolese Army: traveling without money, stumbling by the roadside, crawling through the fields like the Frankenstein beast. He spent two days camped near the US garrison, but couldn’t form a plan. I couldn’t help you, Michael said, I couldn’t help Davidia, I couldn’t help myself. There was nothing I could do. So I just came here—where again, there’s nothing I can do. My people are sick, insane, they’re burning their own huts, they don’t have any food. Not one of them can remember me. They know the names of my mother and father, my mother’s brother, my father’s two cousins who owned a business selling cloth and rope—but they don’t remember the children, not me, or my brother who died, or my two sisters who also died in the disturbances back then, when I left the clan. And poof, our existence is erased. And this woman, La Dolce. I’d like to kill her …

  Michael went on to say:

  “I believe I was nine years old the first time I killed someone. I’m not sure how old I was—I don’t know how old I am now, really.”

  “Tell me it was a woman, or a child.”

  “What’s the point of saying that?”

  “I don’t know. I think you’re trying to be poignant, and I’m trying to undercut you.”

  “There were two of them, and I don’t know who they were. It was during the reprisals. Our clan did nicely, you know, during the time of Idi Amin Dada, because he was Kakwa too. But when he ran away, the machetes came out against the Kakwa, and this creek ran with our blood. I returned here after the village was taken over … This is where it happened. I heard two people talking in a hut, only their voices, not the words, not even the kind of voice—man or woman or child—and I threw in a stick of dynamite. The hut was right over there. You walked through my first murders with your feet … Now I return once again, and everything is dead. Have I brought down a curse on my own clan? What have I done? Have I done something?”

  I’d never known Michael to be afraid, not really. Certainly not terrified like this.

  I lay there on my back, hanging on to my mind, or the equilibrium, let’s say, of my essence—then no longer hanging on, realizing there’s no point.

  Michael said:

  “And I was never with Tina. Even if I was with her before you came along, I would have told you.”

  “I believe you. I was crazy. And there’s something I want to say as well. Are you listening?”

  “I hear you.”

  I sat up and looked straight at him and tried hard to make him believe this—because it’s true—“I’d never grass a friend. I might try and steal his girl and leave him to drown in shit while—well, while running off with his girl. But I’m not a snitch. Never.”

  Michael tossed his machete into the pool and it sank.

  “Holy shit, man. We might need that.”

  “As God is my witness, and as long as I live, I shall never take another life. I shall never kill even one more person. I will die instead, if I have to.”

  He’d stubbed out his cigarette half-smoked and rested it on the rock beside him. Now he straightened it out, took a matchbox from his pants pocket, and spent a couple of minutes lighting it and smoking it down to the filter and looking satisfied with himself. He tossed the butt at the water and stood up, offering me a hand. “Now it’s time to go. Where do we meet the missionaries?”

  “At the road down the hill—the east side, where you come in.”

  “When do we meet them?”

  “I don’t even know if they’re actually coming. But the lady said sometime today.”

  “Let’s go and wait for them. We need to get to Bunia.”

  “Michael,” I said, “you can make it here, but I can’t. I’m no African. I’m like Davidia that way.”

  “So where do you think you’re going?”

  “I suppose it’s prison.”

  “Do you think I’d let them put you in prison?”

  “Is there any other way?”

  “Haven’t I told you from the beginning? There’s always a plan for extraction.” He made a sound like a pig at a trough—sucking back tears. His pride in himself, at this moment, had brought on a seizure of sentiment. “After everything, it’s still the two of us.”

  * * *

  Davidia: As we walked out of the village, the hippopotamus-woman La Dolce roused her clan and harried them after us partway down the hill. She cried, “Laugh at them, laugh at them!” and then “Riez! Riez!”

  She said: “Don’t touch them, don’t talk to them, do you see the Devil in their eyes? Riez! Riez!”

  I didn’t think them capable of it, but one or two coughed up shreds of laughter and spit them at us. Soon the whole mob was yammering like dogs. Michael bowed his back. His head hung low. “Riez! Riez!” Like hens, like terrified geese. I followed behind him as he was driven from his family.

  [NOV 1 6PM]

  Dear Tina, Dear Davidia—<
br />
  Again I’m writing to you by candlelight, but only because the power’s blinked out in our corner of Freetown.

  We’re staying, now, at the National Pride Suites, which have nothing to be proud of. Out the window, West Africa: a lane like a sewer. Cockeyed shanties. Inexplicable laughter.

  Downstairs there’s a bar, intermittently air-conditioned, fragrant with liquor and lime and the cologne of prostitutes, but I’m not a patron—I’m on an indefinite drinks moratorium, thanks to a bargain I’ve made with Michael. And without the drinks, the women seem stripped of their appeal.

  In any case, I’m not one hundred percent. Nursing a bit of a belly—that Goddamn Newada creek. Apparently certain microbes thrive on heavy metals.

  However, the small percent of me that feels all right feels absolutely wonderful.

  I don’t need booze, or sex. I’ve spent the last two hours napping with my head on a sack full of cash. One hundred thousand US dollars. Minus recent expenses. Not a substantial cushion, just one thousand pieces of paper zipped up in a plastic carrier pouch, but oh how comfortable, and how sweet my dreams.

  * * *

  Tina, I hope you got out of Amsterdam. Hope you got away. Hope you didn’t sit there waiting for the poisonous fallout from my ruin.

  Hah. “Fallout.”

  But Tina, I’m serious: someday I’ll put it all down in words and send it to you, and I’ll enclose this last note on top. I don’t know what a thorough confession might do for you, or what it might do to ease this combination of dread and anger working at my insides … For whatever it’s worth, someday—the story from beginning to end.

  And the end will be spectacular: Michael and I riding to Bunia in an Isuzu Trooper all heavenly blue and purified white packed with Seventh-day Adventists, and our intrepid machine rockets us through storms, crashes, earthquakes, I don’t know what, really—I slept the entire two hundred kilometers, except for a couple of times when the man on my left, a Congolese youth named Max, woke me to complain I was drooling on his shoulder. The trip ended at the mission’s church in Bunia, where those of us with religion went inside, and the two lost souls, Michael and I, stood under the awning of a cycle shop, trying to carve a plan out of the rain.

  You have to remember, Tina, that the end wasn’t yet, that all I had was Michael Adriko, meaning all I had was bitterness and doubt—and 68 hours to make the next 4800 kilometers.