“A Kurtz?” she said and laughed.
“Yes,” I admitted, feeling less self-conscious. “I wish it were otherwise.”
“Well, if you don’t find him, I’m sure you’ll stumble across some other ones.”
“That’s the backup plan.”
“Are you independent?”
“I am. It leaves time for personal writing. Years ago, when I began doing this, I’d buy a one-way ticket to strand myself overseas and then write to make enough money to pay my way back. It taught me to find stories everywhere.”
“It sounds as if you could have become a Kurtz yourself.”
“It wasn’t inconceivable.”
Coming down the aisle sideways, an old white man in khaki clutched the seats. He encroached on our circle of light like a night creature testing a boundary—and then loomed over us, before lurching on.
She reached up to the reading lights and turned one off.
I considered what to say next, refraining from asking a question that would tie her coloring to Africa or mark her interest there as part of her heritage. But she spoke first, the absence of any strong regional inflection in her voice again making me wonder if English wasn’t her native language.
“I suppose you might like to write about our little white witch.”
“I would of course credit the anthropologist’s work and interview him.”
“That should do the job.” She laughed. “He is no enemy to recognition.”
The story of a black girl possessed by a white demon and turned white was already lacerating the edges of my imagination, and I was glad for her response.
She talked more about the girl, about how the anthropologist had been interviewing her with the help of a Congolese interpreter before transcribing and then translating her responses.
“His project is fraught. He asks questions in French that the interpreter translates to Lingala, since the girl doesn’t respond to French, despite her rudimentary grasp. The translator then renders her answers into French, from which my friend translates them into English, since he is doing post-doctoral work at Dartmouth. We must assume that a lot is lost.”
I liked how she spoke—the fluency of her pauses, as if she were simply emphasizing, and how, sometimes, she turned her palms up to stress a point, loosely knitting her fingers.
Past her shoulder, the night topography began to shift, and she followed my gaze. She tapped the button on the window, clearing the dark tint from the glass, and we were suddenly staring down at an alien horizon of bottom-lit clouds, as if flying over a gas giant. The alienating distance from our planet registered in my body, a pulse of uncertainty in the nerves along the bones of my chest.
“So how did you get into writing?” she asked, suddenly sounding tired.
“I grew up poor, and we didn’t have much in the house other than used books my mom picked up. She had artistic ambitions for me, to say the least, and there wasn’t much else to do but read or go to the library.”
I suddenly felt divided. I wanted to say, “Stories saved my life.” It was a line I often found myself thinking, during moments when I considered what a truly narrative species we are—measured, constrained, or liberated by story. I sometimes said it when giving talks, since it jolted the audience into presence, into a connection with me. It was exaggerated in a way that obliged people to listen closely, to judge whether I was being authentic, and in that moment I could offer the best I had.
I glanced past her, to where the moon peered at us from above the plunging curve of the earth, beneath the cavernous hood of space. I hesitated, afraid of being manipulative, but that we were among the few passengers not overcome by torpor gave me a sense of being separate, even special—or at least of intimacy and trust.
“Stories,” I said, “novels, actually—they saved my life.”
She turned a little more toward me and looked into my eyes, waiting.
“My father had a fifth-grade education,” I told her. “When he saw me reading, he would hunch and glare at me. I guess my reading must have made him feel smaller, like a failure. He’d never read a novel, and I often read one a day.
“Anyway, he told me how the future should look, but I knew there were other futures. I’d read them in books.”
The sunrise emanated from the clouds, shining on the wingtip like a star and creeping red along the metal. The hum of the fuselage had become faintly shrill, and our fatigue was suddenly apparent. The air felt staticky as she yawned. There were circles under her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said and touched my wrist. “Thank you for sharing that.”
“The fatigue comes on hard, doesn’t it?”
“It’s as if we see the sun and realize we haven’t really slept.”
I wanted to finish the story, but it seemed too much to explain my eroding faith in free will, or that novels had also taught me to chase impossibilities, conjuring villains as I crossed the planet to find them.
I was again tempted to ask where she was from—to cement her in my mind as a person I knew so I could quell my sudden feeling of vulnerability, even though I often divulged my story in lecture halls. But I refused to speak the question that she no doubt heard more often than any other. Rather, I wished I could delete not only that impulse from my brain but also my memories of the culture that had created it.
She was turned away, facing the window, and the light fractured around her, cut by her curling strands of hair and the line of her neck.
All along the blazing wing, the sunrise bled.
PASTOR THOMAS OMÉGA
In the minutes before landing, I fell into a dream. Descending a stairwell, I came upon my father sitting, stroking a big calico cat that lazed on his lap.
The wheels bumped the runway, and I woke. The antimalarial I’d taken, Pentus, was new on the market, and I’d read that it could induce Technicolor dreams or visions but that the effect mellowed in the days after each weekly dose.
Sola looked at me quizzically, maybe shyly, as I stood up to take down my backpack. I must have appeared groggy and tried to smile. I gave her my card, and she said she would e-mail me. Then we were corralled off the plane while saying goodbye, which proved unnecessary, as we ended up walking through the airport and having breakfast together.
By the time we boarded our connection, she’d given me her e-mail and Congo number, and though I briefly considered finding a way to sit with her, I’d booked today’s flight for a reason and had work to do. She was seated not far behind me, in the company of a tall man with a handsome profile who struck up a conversation, smiling and gesticulating, and I noticed that three rows ahead of me, the seat next to Pastor Thomas Oméga was empty. He hadn’t appeared to have noticed me, even though we’d spoken at a conference a week before and he’d told me which day he would be flying back to the Congo. He’d encouraged me to take the same flight so he could facilitate my investigation into the practices of conservation organizations—which was how I’d presented my work, not mentioning the individual who was my focus.
As the fuselage resonated with the thud of the closing cabin door, I stood, stepped quickly up the aisle, and sat.
“Ah,” he said, “je savais que tu allais me trouver”—I knew you would find me.
Round