The Resolutions

by Brady Hammes

“I told you,” Edwin said, standing in the door of the kitchen.

  Jonah wrapped his arms around her and kissed her on the forehead. It was the confirmation he’d been waiting for. “Did Laurent go with them?” he asked.

  “And Remy too,” Helen said. “They waited for you this morning, but when you didn’t come they left.”

  “Thank you, Helen.” Jonah walked to the dining room and helped himself to a beer. Edwin placed a call to an INTERPOL agent back in Libreville, trying to explain the botched operation. Jonah took a special satisfaction in knowing that for once he was not the cause of the shit storm swirling around him. Because there was nothing for him to do at the moment, he stepped onto the porch and drank two more beers in quick succession. Edwin, who normally possessed the steely composure of a military general, was scrambling around like an under-staffed restaurant manager. As the day wore on, Jonah’s exhaustion from the night before caught up with him, and he lifted his feet onto an overturned plastic bucket, tossed an arm over his eyes, and drifted into a delicious sleep.

  * * *

  —

  “JONAH,” A VOICE WHISPERED.

  He blinked awake and saw Helen standing above him. “Hey,” he said, sitting up.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your nap, but I need to talk to you about your friend. The Englishman.” She scanned the surroundings to make sure Edwin couldn’t hear what she was about to say.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Slinky was here this morning,” she whispered. “He asked if I had seen you, but I told him no. He asked me if I’d seen another white man, but again I said no. But he did not believe me and became very angry. He said I was lying. I’m very sorry, Jonah, but I think he knows about this Englishman. I think he knows what is happening with you.”

  “It’s okay, Helen,” he said, trying to reassure her. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Someone must have tipped Slinky off after seeing Edwin’s truck drive through town late last night, which would explain why he’d sent a decoy in his place. Jonah had considered this possibility and even thought about relaying his concerns to Edwin, but he figured it wasn’t his place to manage the logistics. Gossip traveled quickly around here, so he was a little surprised that Edwin, with his years of experience, hadn’t been a little more inconspicuous when rolling through town late at night in an unfamiliar truck.

  Jonah walked back inside. Edwin was sitting at a plastic table drinking a beer, a map spread before him. “Someone tipped him off,” Jonah said.

  “I figured as much,” Edwin said.

  “So now what? My cover’s blown.”

  “If he wants his money, he’ll be in touch.”

  “And what do we do until then?”

  Edwin turned to Jonah and smiled. “We wait.”

  SAMANTHA

  REMY DROVE THEM THROUGH A labyrinth of untamed forest, a winding dirt road devoid of markers and signposts. Sam had felt safe in town, but as they ventured deeper into the forest, she was overcome with a pinching anxiety. The road tossed her stomach around, and her head throbbed. She’d resisted the urge to pop another Oxy, and she hadn’t eaten anything all day, part of the purging process Remy said was necessary in order to purify her body for the journey ahead. And what was this journey? She didn’t know exactly. She’d avoided researching anything about the ceremony for fear that she might back out, instead trusting that Jonah would guide her through it. And now Jonah was nowhere to be found. This was a problem, not just immediately, but in general, this reliance on other people to make decisions for her. Growing up, most everything had been managed by other people—parents, ballet instructors, tutors— so that she could focus on dance, but now that dance was gone, she found herself unequipped for the messy responsibilities of adulthood. In the past few years, everything in her life—including this impromptu trip to the other side of the world—had been hastily arranged, and she had no one to blame but herself.

  They arrived at the village three hours later. A few dozen people stood around a handful of mud huts with thatch roofs, awaiting their arrival. Remy and Laurent went about shaking the hands of the villagers, presenting the men with gifts of tobacco, the children with balloons. Sam and Gavin watched from a distance until Laurent motioned for them to come forward.

  “This is Grace,” Laurent said to Sam. “She will be your Bwiti mother.”

  Grace was a short, thin woman dressed in a purple sarong and a floral headscarf. She had a warm, maternal smile. “Very nice to meet you,” Sam said, shaking the woman’s hand.

  “You are ready?” Grace asked in heavily accented English.

  She wasn’t ready, but she also wasn’t sure if she ever would be, so she said, “I think so.”

  Grace smiled and took her hand. “Come.”

  * * *

  —

  IT BEGAN WITH A BATH. Sam removed her clothes and followed Grace and six other tribeswomen to the river, where she was lowered into water so cold it made her heart flinch. Grace described it as a spiritual cleansing, but it struck Sam as something like a backwoods baptism. Afterward, she was loosely wrapped, from shoulders to knees, in white cloth and escorted back to the village, where men in raffia skirts pounded frenetically on small drums, a schizophrenic rhythm that did little to calm her nerves. There were people touching her, guiding her, speaking in a language she didn’t understand. She hadn’t even ingested the drug and she already felt disoriented.

  She looked to Gavin, standing some distance away. She could see the concern on his face, and though she tried to hide it, she was having second thoughts as well. It was a three-hour drive back to Laurent’s place, followed by a dozen more to the airport in Libreville. She knew something unpleasant awaited her, and despite Remy’s assurance that everything would be fine, it was difficult to quiet the possibility that it might not be. She knew it would take only one small look to Gavin, a nod that she wanted out, and her brother would whisk her away. But then what? Where would she go from there? Back to her old ways, of course. She couldn’t go back there.

  An antelope horn was blown, setting the ceremony in motion. A woman approached and painted Sam’s face with white kaolin, a cold paste that cemented on her skin like a face mask. She was led to a hut and seated in the center of a circle formed by six village elders. Grace arrived with a plate containing a dozen small brown mounds that resembled meatballs. Sam opened her mouth and when the first one touched her tongue, the reflex was immediate. It tasted like dirt, or spent coffee grounds, or what she imagined battery acid might taste like. She had ingested psilocybin mushrooms a few times, but this was something else entirely. When her stomach tried to expel this thing it did not want, Grace covered Sam’s mouth with her hand. A moment later, she ate another one, then two more, and when she gagged again, Grace yanked her head back to keep the drug from escaping. “This is the first part,” Grace said. “We call this the dying stage.”

  Some time passed—it was hard to say how long—and the drug settled in. Grace placed a small mirror on the ground, and when Sam looked at it she did not recognize what she saw. Hello? Who is this? She felt feverish, nauseous, not that different from the dope sickness that plagued her withdrawals. But then something else happened. She felt her veins contracting, the blood choking in her body. There was a burning sensation in her chest, as if her organs were being electrocuted. Her heartbeat slowed and her vision echoed and then suddenly, violently, she jerked forward and expelled the contents of her stomach.

  Now the world was breaking apart. Pink currents of electricity, something like a Tesla coil, fractured her vision. The walls of the hut separated like a continental drift, leaving deep crevasses of black, through which a cold wind blew. She willed her mind to stitch the scene back together, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, it repaired itself. Her body vibrated. She could not move. Her surroundings were reduced to sounds and textures. She watched the dull, amorphous outline of a man playin
g a mouth harp. A few minutes later, Grace administered the flood dose and Sam was no longer swimming but instead being catapulted through a kind of pneumatic tube of past experiences, a patchwork of memories, the most vibrant of which coalesced into still life tableaus that branded themselves onto her psyche.

  The day we buried Grandpa and got drunk on bourbon, and shot potato guns from the deck, and you guys told me we were celebrating a life well lived, but I couldn’t see it that way through the tears. How do you celebrate an absence? I’d asked, and you both looked at each other because you didn’t know, but you were my brothers and so you tried.

  Early November, late nineties. The abandoned house with a trampoline and a half pipe dusted with leaves. No one skates it anymore, you said, standing at the top, board perched on the coping, Jonah egging you to drop in, but you never dropped in. I danced The Nutcracker on the trampoline while the season’s first snow began to fall.

  The time I was chased through a field by an angry bull, and I climbed up a tree and stayed there until it was dark, and you both came hollering with flashlights, and Jonah carried me down and Gavin wrapped me in his sweatshirt, the one that said MIDWEST IS THE BEST, and I still believe that.

  I am ten, I am six, I am nineteen, I am twenty-six. I am thriving, I am learning, I am cocksure, I am lost. I am the girl inside the closet.

  * * *

  —

  A HAND ON HER SHOULDER, Grace standing above her. “Walk.”

  Grace led her to a clearing in the forest. Her legs were stiff and she had to command them to do their job. Birds flew overhead like fighter jets. Trees pulsed with energy. The sun radiated against her flesh. She was shaking, her internal temperature rising and falling. She felt exhausted, ravished, as if her body had been scrubbed on a cellular level. This wasn’t a detoxification; it was an acid wash. Her soul became a physical thing, swelling and contracting, pressing against her skin. Her mind no longer comprehended linear time, and she wondered if she would ever escape the drug’s grip. Grace christened her with the flower of a parasol tree, then opened her hand, revealing more iboga. “Open,” she said.

  Sam shook her head. “No more.”

  “You are stuck,” Grace said. She placed her hand on the back of Sam’s neck and brought their foreheads together. “Push through,” she whispered.

  “I can’t,” Sam said, shaking her head, convinced she was dying.

  “You must,” Grace said, holding her chin in her hands.

  Sam reluctantly opened her mouth.

  “Now the hard part,” Grace said, pressing the iboga against her tongue. “Stage two. The lifting of the curse.”

  “Please,” Sam whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  “Down,” Grace said, helping Sam onto the ground. Kneeling, Sam looked up at Grace, whose eyes were closed to the sky. “Apongina,” Grace said to no one, to the heavens. She took Sam’s hands and ran them along the sides of her own chest, slid them beneath her arms, then cupped them in front of her face and blew. Grace then pressed her own hands together, said a few words under her breath, and threw them wide in thanksgiving. She began reciting an incantation in her native tongue, though whether it was a condemnation or a prayer, Sam couldn’t say.

  When her speech was finished, Sam opened her eyes.

  “Go visit the dead,” Grace said. “Tell them what you know. Ask for forgiveness.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Follow this,” Grace said, tapping a spot in the center of Sam’s forehead. “I am with you.”

  Sam closed her eyes. She felt herself falling through her past, her time in Russia, New York, finally landing in the living room of the loft that night when she and Atticus had stumbled home in the predawn light, silently raging at each other over some injustice neither could properly articulate. The fight had arisen in the back of the cab, something about leaving a party too soon, or maybe staying too late, even at the time it was unclear. What was clear was that they were both unhappy, casting blame at each other, Sam accusing Atticus of dragging her into his poisoned atmosphere, Atticus accusing Sam of enabling his addiction, which had swelled and arranged itself into a kind of scaffolding that now encased his life. “You don’t care what happens to me,” he’d said, fixing a dose on the living room couch. “You’re not trying hard enough,” Sam had shot back, though she knew the advice was equally applicable to her. Compared to her boyfriend, she’d been in a better place back then, though of course there was no good place on the opium spectrum. She slammed the bedroom door and fell, fully clothed, onto the bed, where she slept until she was awoken the next morning by the groan of a garbage truck on the street below. She walked to the living room and discovered him slumped on the couch, his chin resting against his chest, the needle in his arm. She ran to him and shook his shoulders, bellowing, pleading, then finally apologizing.

  But now, back in Gabon, her eyes flicked open and she put a hand to her forehead, sweating, breathless. Grace helped her to her feet. “Where am I?” she asked.

  “You are still here,” Grace said. “You are still in this world.”

  GAVIN

  HE SAT AGAINST A TREE, watching a woman bathe a small child in a pail of water. The baby smiled at him, and Gavin smiled back. He wondered what the woman thought of this foreign white man loafing around her village, without any real task or place to be. Everyone in the village was doing something—chopping wood or harvesting cassavas or bathing children—but Gavin had been sitting on his ass for the last two hours. The problem was that he wasn’t needed. He wasn’t needed in Los Angeles and he wasn’t needed in New Mexico and he certainly wasn’t needed in Gabon. He’d come here to help his sister, yet there was nothing he could do for her. Sam had been inside the hut for hours, but his requests to see her had thus far been denied. Everything is fine, they told him. She is strong. He knew she was strong—he didn’t need to be told that—but it was the uncertainty that bothered him, not being able to observe the process. This whole procedure struck him as flagrantly regressive, this misguided belief that drug addiction could be cured through the administration of other, more exotic drugs. It wasn’t that he was against alternative medicine, but this was something far more primitive, and that’s what bothered him most.

  According to Laurent, Sam would likely be out for the rest of the day, probably longer, so he took a walk around the village. He imagined how sweet it would be to stumble across a cold beer and an air-conditioned room, or, on a more practical level, a glass of water and some bread to fill his stomach. Some company might also be nice, someone to chat with, but he imagined Laurent was the only person who spoke any English, and he was busy having his leg inspected by the village doctor. Gavin passed a schoolhouse with a half dozen kids sitting on little stools and then, farther along, two men repairing a thatch roof.

  He followed a dirt road out of town, finally stopping to rest at a wooden bridge straddling a narrow creek. He took stock of his surroundings, the forest thrumming with birds, stretching outward in every direction. He was a long way from the table reads and oyster dinners of Los Angeles, and maybe that was a good thing. City life dulled the senses, masked the specific hardship that results from extended time out of doors. Part of his reason for coming here—aside from his sister’s recovery—was for the plain adventure of it all. Jonah was by far the more daring of the two of them, and he secretly admired the bit of wild man in his brother. They were so similar in some ways, yet so different in others. “Spend too much time in a city,” Jonah had warned him on the train ride into the forest, “and one day you’ll wake up dickless with a sixty-dollar haircut.” Gavin had gone quiet at the warning, because his haircut—which included a glass of Islay scotch—cost ninety dollars after tip.

  A vehicle approached from down the road. Gavin stepped aside and watched a battered truck cross the bridge, then pull to a stop in the middle of the roa
d. A man stepped out and began walking toward him. Unlike the villagers, he was dressed in Western attire, camouflage cargo pants and a faded T-shirt. He was muscular, his face splotched with old acne scars, his nose spongy and red like a barroom drunk. “Hello,” he said, lifting a hand in greeting.

  “You speak English?” Gavin said.

  “Of course,” the man said, drawing nearer. “You must be Jonah’s brother, yes?”

  Gavin wasn’t totally surprised that this man assumed he was related to the only other white man in the village, but it seemed odd that he knew Jonah’s name. “You know my brother?”

  “Yes. Jonah is a friend of mine. I saw him this morning.”

  “Where?”

  “Back in town,” he said, jabbing a thumb in the direction from which he’d come. “He arrived after you left. You just missed him.”

  “Is he coming here?”

  “I don’t know. He would like you to call him.”

  “Do you have a phone I can use?”

  “In my truck,” the man said, motioning. “Come.”

  As he followed the man back to the truck, Gavin rehearsed the righteous medley of profanities he would unleash upon his brother, tuning the cadence, finessing the verbiage. He thrilled at the sweetness of his anger. “So how do you know Jonah?”

  “We work together,” the man said, leaning into the cab. He tossed an empty beer bottle onto the ground, then an empty pack of cigarettes, before finally emerging with a phone.

  “You work with elephants as well?”

  “Sort of,” he said, handing Gavin the phone.

  “So you know Laurent then?”

  The man smiled. “We’re old friends.”

  “Any idea who this English guy is? He seems like trouble. I’m not really sure what’s going on, but I think my brother got mixed up in something bad.”