ROOM 22(2)
&
THE WILDLIFE OF ASPEN
At the hotel, I was so stunned when the clerk handed me my room card that I failed to ask for a different one before he moved on to the next guest. I took the elevator up and walked directly to the door. Two metal squares read 22 next to a patch of adhesive where the third had hung. I swiped and stepped inside, and stood in the gloom of drawn blinds outlined by the city’s faint electric effusion.
Room 22(2) had been my home for five months during my trip here over a decade ago, when I decided to become a war reporter. In the French style, the second floor was two stories up from the ground level—“too high to jump and yet too close to the violence in the streets to feel safe,” I joked with friends. The nation was Zaire back then, for a few weeks after my arrival, before Laurent-Désiré Kabila marched out of the east and into Kinshasa with a ragtag army of Congolese and battle-hardened Rwandan Tutsis, set up his government in the hotel’s top floors, and rolled back the country’s name to Congo.
Evenings, when I went downstairs to see what was on the menu, men with gold glasses, bejeweled rings, and suits more expensive than everything I owned combined sometimes invited me to their tables. For lack of an Eastern European weapons dealer, they had me sit with them. “Un journaliste,” they said and laughed. “You’ve come to the Congo at the right time, my friend.” Other evenings, they left me alone, as they were already seated with more authentic figures—white men with narrow faces, crooked, tightly shaved jaws, and gazes that were cold, unwavering, and predatory.
In my room, I awakened each sunrise to an avocado on my windowsill. I’d received it one afternoon, during a long power outage when I was trying to finish an article before my laptop battery died. Someone had banged on the door, and when I opened it, a paratrooperish man exuding the etheric cloud of prolonged inebriation said he’d knocked on the wrong one but then, in a low voice, warned me not to write offensive nonsense, before peeling the hand grenade off his vest with an extravagant gesture of bounty—as if he were the tree of life—and handing it to me.
“You never know,” he told me and laughed, showing a broken tooth.
A few months later, the embers of the First Congo War—which had rippled out from the Rwandan Genocide—reignited in the east, fracturing the country and precipitating the Second Congo War: a continuation of one long bloodletting in the eyes of many Congolese. As its massacres began, I left the hotel to get a closer look at a despairing people, to interview warlords, the hollow-faced human rights activists and UN inspectors tasked with body counts, and the mai-mai militiamen doused in the holy oils that made both them and their enemies believe they were bulletproof.
In the years since the Congo wars, I worked in Afghanistan, Somalia, Colombia, and Iraq before moving to Brooklyn, where I fell into a slump, not answering messages, lying in bed all day reading and leaving my sublet only for groceries.
One night, a friend passing through the city convinced me to meet her for dinner with the promise of a journalistic scoop. She told me that the US had allocated millions to protect the Congo rainforest and that corporate conservation organizations, the majority of which had failed to get a foothold there during both Mobutu’s dictatorship and the war, had, in the decade since, been jockeying for the areas of highest biodiversity, often doing harm to local social structures and wasting as many resources competing with each other as they used for conservation.
The timing was fortuitous, since I was living off credit cards. The next day, I e-mailed a pitch to Mother Jones—“Big Conservation’s Scramble for Africa”—and a week later, I flew to Aspen, Colorado, for a conference that was bringing together organizations and donors to discuss the Congo’s future.
The lodge where I’d booked a room—the cheapest I could find—had an unpainted wood exterior and interior that gave it a look less rustic than outmoded. A stout woman with a yellow perm checked me in and then put a placemat-sized map in front of me.
“You can walk along the river here,” she told me, sliding her finger along a blue line. “It’s a nice trail, though sometimes people run into mountain lions on it. But if you’re looking for cougars, I would suggest these three bars near the lifts.”
“Pardon me,” I said. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Come on. You’re a handsome young man who’s checked in alone, and most of the guys who come here try out the cougar bars. Aspen has some of the richest cougars in the country—the ex-trophy wives of millionaires and billionaires.” She made a vague motion to her face and chest. “Which means the best doctors and the hottest cougars.”
I thanked her, and after a light dinner at a nearby restaurant, I went for a jog along the fragrant hedges of high-summer Aspen. On all sides, summits curtailed the night sky, cradling the few, vivid stars. The purity and thinness of the mountain air made the insides of my lungs feel pleasantly scraped. There was a slight altitude-induced tightness at the back of my neck, and a stinging each time I took a breath, but though I was tired, when I returned to my bed, I couldn’t sleep.
I got up and dressed without the light, since I hoped the dark might lull me back to bed, but my brain glowed with the thought of a previously unimagined romantic connection after so many months without even going on a date—and then I was unplugging my phone and stepping out.
The bar was an elegant fusion of oaken frontier virtue and classic speakeasy leather, though the only thing smoky about the place was its lack of visibility. The designer must have specialized in lighting for a certain kind of face. The ambience was dusky and smoothing, like a social media filter for everything after midlife.
There were no mirrors. Draped and veiled in fashionable shadows, the women were each other’s mirrors. And yet the eye needs a fraction of a second to judge an artificial smile. Real ones fluctuate, hesitate, an entire language in how they linger. These were fairy tale smiles, waiting beneath ice.
At the table nearest me, a woman’s pale-violet gown cleaved to precise curves, and she turned, advertising a countenance as smooth as a plaque.
Another woman, this one my age and with blond dreads like hawsers, sat across from her.
“Looking for someone?” she asked.
“I’m in town for a conference. I thought I’d have a drink before bed.”
She slapped the seat next to her. “Join us. I’m here for it too.”
The older woman moved her lips faintly, some disappointment showing in her eyes, and then stood and crossed the bar.
“She’s saying hi to a friend,” the dreadlocked woman told me. “Oh, I’m Terra.”
“Terra Sylvan-Gaia?”
“Shit. My reputation precedes me.”
“I’ve read about your work,” I said but refrained from adding that I’d expected someone closer to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey’s generation. It was too soon to discuss my research, so I made small talk, asking how much time she’d spent in Aspen.
“A fair bit. My aunt lives here. I’ve been catching up with her.” She lifted her jaw in the direction of the woman who’d left the table.
Terra must have read something in my expression, since she added, “Cougars run in the family, but that’s because beauty and money do, though never enough. It’s hard to give up any sort of power, and since beautiful women