As she stood to leave, my desire lurched within me, a bodily motion, though I held still. I hated attraction like this and often, in response, I worked my mind into a disciplined state and deconstructed my perceptions, convincing myself that I knew nothing about the person, that—in terms of raw data—she hardly existed behind my projections. But doing this also made me look more closely, and I wanted to look now, to ask questions, but the door was already closing.
I settled my gaze on the page: this slight connection to a child whose humanity seemed no more than the idea of a child and yet could connect me—if I made myself sensitive to it—to Sola, who herself was less a person in my mind than the idea of potential I loved so much.
There was the line again. It glowed like the light emitted from a bulb whose incandescing prevents you from seeing the object at its source.
I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.
But I will never tell you the secrets of the streets. Magic is no choice. We do it to survive. Hunger get so bad your feet turn to roots so you can live on the juice of the earth. You walk past little trees and they are children. Skinny branches for arms. Heads a bush of leaves gobbling up sunlight. We do that for an hour or two, hoping no greedy cook come and cut us down to make fire in her kitchen.
You think I don’t know things. I live with my écurie.5 We have secret places. We have friends. The mokonzi6 love us and bring presents from far away. At night, we fly to jungle and dance with spirits. Or we fly to Europe. We drink blood from diamond cups, eat sweet pudding from human flesh, pudding so thick and strong it run into our bones and make them creak like the hot metal of old truck, when you hiding under it.
I tell you this story for your bonbons, but I will kill you, white demon. Mami Wata and I will cut your throat and pour your blood into a diamond glass, and we will drink it and laugh. She will turn me into a snake and I will leave through these walls.
I closed my eyes, commanding my brain to remember what Sola had asked of me—that I was reading about a twelve-year-old child abandoned here. It was hard to see her as blameless when she sounded so certain, so determined to kill.
Again I thought of the white man who’d bathed her—who’d maybe been trying to save her—and of Hew, and then of Oméga’s words about how the spirits left nothing to chance. But I was inclined to believe that the story we wanted to tell led us, shifting the focus of the world.
I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.
The streets call me. My sisters dance and the spirits hear them. They bring me. They cut the sky in two and let me in.
I know you want to hear about the graveyard of souls, because you want to know how I will kill you. You should be giving me libulu ya mbongo.7 No? Some pelouse8 maybe? No? Then give me the whole bag of bonbons.
Okay, it’s easy. You do the business as usual. You spread the legs for mbongo, but you be sure to use the kapote.9 He do his thing fast. It always fast, not like the older boys in the street, the ones who like you, who have nothing to run home to. The mokonzi, they just want something extra. So we girls catch their poison in the kapote, and we knot it, and we take it to the graveyard.
We get down between the headstones and make sure no demon is close. We dig holes and then we stick crooked branches in the ground and hang the kapote.
At first, nothing happen. Those ugly bags of man sap hang in the dark. Then the moon shine in them, and the light inside the rubber start, like spark in dry grass. It get bigger until it bright like to blind us and we see the demon seed squirming inside. Then, from every side of the graveyard, the spirits of the mokonzi appear, walking like they have broken knees, arms out like this, like zombie, tripping and reaching …
My cell rang, followed by honking outside. Oméga had arrived. I didn’t want to stop reading, but making him wait wouldn’t be respectful.
I stood and called to Bram and Sola that I was leaving.
“It’s no problem,” he said, appearing in the doorway, “you can finish later.”
“Do you mind if I take this copy?” I held up the manuscript.
“I do. I’d like to retain control of the material until I have a polished draft and we’ve finalized our contractual agreement.”
I hadn’t expected this and glanced at the pages, unsure of what to say.
He came nearer and slid them from my hand. He smiled, standing uncomfortably close and showing two rows of small, straight, very white teeth.
“Be patient,” he said. “A cliffhanger is nothing more than an interruption.”
1. Strong, derived from the word Yankee. Despite the negative influence Americans exert on the Congo, Yankee has become a term for power. (All notes in this chapter are from the text of Bram Rees.)
2. Good luck, also whiteness. This juxtaposition is striking: whiteness as strength and whiteness as evil. In post-independence Congo, whiteness is seen as the source of harm—the force that has kept many Congolese in servitude, with Western powers manipulating the government so as to exploit the Congo’s resources. And yet whiteness also embodies savvy and power.
3. Weak and unable to find money.
4. Idiot.
5. Gang; literally “stable” in French, as in “horse stable.”
6. Big men; powerful men.
7. A whole lot of money (mbongo).
8. Marijuana, literally “lawn” in French.
9. Condom.
THE CHURCH OF THE ALBINO PROPHET
The traffic was dense, the thoroughfares particularly crowded with hulking trucks—Frankenstein vehicles resurrected over and over, assembled from an army of fallen Lazaruses, their pieces bolted, hammered, wired in place. The sky was, after all, white with the haze of unmitigated exhaust, and the big trucks, as they struggled to accelerate, left dark fog banks through which we drove.
My dream returned, the blinding mist, the gravity of the vast current palpable in the night. The Congo River ran flush with Kinshasa, replenished by hundreds of tributaries—a watery labyrinth spanning the equator and draining an eighth of the African continent. And here, right before the river pummeled down to the sea, it separated two national capitals that had once been part of the Kongo Empire: the Republic of Congo’s Brazzaville, a city of two million, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kinshasa—eleven million strong: labyrinths within labyrinths. But this river wasn’t the phantom waterway from my dream the night before. That was another, almost as big, maybe even mistier, from my childhood.
Oméga was explaining that if a white street girl had been possessed by a white demon, she would eventually find her way to a famed prophète who knew how to do battle with such demons, since he’d been born under the spell of one.
“His story is unlike that of any other pastor. He’s un albinos. Such people are common in Africa—more so than elsewhere—and yet there’s no more unfortunate thing here. Some witch doctors say that their flesh is magic and eating it will heal you or give you good fortune. Others say that the albino is a source of evil and albinism is contagious. Albino children are sometimes sold. Even adults can be captured and their body parts used for ceremonies.”
He sighed, with the faint, resigned smile of one considering life’s absurd cruelty.
“I’ve never really understood, but so many people die of starvation that I suppose