“That’s terrible—just terrible. Jesus.” I sucked in my breath and pondered what else I should say. “Don’t you think he could have just misplaced it?” I finally offered. “Has he checked his car?”
“Don’t you know—we turned that car UPSIDE DOWN!” Jonathan made a chinking motion with both hands held up to the air like an imaginary gear belt turning over. “He was waving his folder at me in front of the Laos Embassy. He was carrying around MY LIFE in that rat-ass folder! He’s not even sure he left the passport on his desk.”
“Do you think someone could have taken it?”
His eyes narrowed. “You know, that’s what I’ve been sitting out here thinking. That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. He’s told all the staff in the office that there’s a reward. If a Cambodian took it, they will hand it over for the money.”
“What makes you think a Cambodian took it?”
“Because they are thieves. Don’t you know? Cambodians are beeg thieves! Tssst.”
He was disgusted by my questions and I couldn’t blame him. He was now document-less; illegal in a country that suspected everything about him anyway. Unhouseled. Sepulchered. But I couldn’t think of a single Cambodian who would want anything to do with a Nigerian passport. I could, however, picture a bar full of idle, indolent African boys who had overstayed their visas—some by as long as two years.
None of it made any sense and yet it was so.
Suddenly my head felt very clear. There was one thing I understood: that passport with Jonathan’s visa history would be very valu able to someone. Someone young. Someone who needed to leave the country fast. Someone who could pay.
“You white people don’t believe in anything.”
We were walking down Street 63 and his comment felt splashed out of nowhere, like an acid attack. I stopped walking and turned to face him.
“And how did you arrive at this deduction? From everything you’ve learned about white people watching StarWorld TV? Or perhaps from that German girl you dated? Either way, I’m impressed. So just because I tell you to take something a so-called voodoo priest is text messaging you from 10,000 miles away with a grain of salt, I’m godless, right? I’m completely lacking in faith because I don’t follow a VOODOO PRIEST—is that it?”
My heart was scampering up my ribcage.
Jonathan had told me how the priest worked for the African bar on consultancy. Every time a violent fight broke out or a cell phone so much as disappeared, the proprietor of the bar text messaged this man a list of the names of all of the men who had set foot in his establishment on the evening in question. This is where the voodoo came in: Jonathan claimed that the priest would then text back a single name to the proprietor—the culprit’s—a task he had carried out for years with 98 percent accuracy. Regarding his missing passport, the list of names he had sent to the priest was relatively short: a few employees with whom the President shared his office space, including the cleaning lady; two African boys rumored to be involved in drug deals gone sour; last but not least, Agbeze.
The priest had advised Jonathan to fast and pray for five days, but mid-afternoon on the third day he must have texted him a name. I recall the little chirp of the Nokia when the message hit his inbox. Jonathan refused to show me the text, but it was obvious to me the priest had told him to go after Agbeze. This was two days ago, and despite having already received what he believed to be ironclad information about the culprit, Jonathan had insisted on completing his fast.
I did everything within my power to keep him in my bedroom for those last two days. A fasting Jonathan could hurt only himself, but I was beginning to wonder what a non-fasting Jonathan might do. During his fast an expression crept into my boyfriend’s face that spooked me: Jonathan would be hunched over contemplating his problems, staring into space; I would glance over at him and for a second his face would appear like an object made of wood. His features would become crude as if carved with a hatchet and the crevices in the wood burned until their contours were defined by charcoal. Then the body underneath the mask would materialize muscular and seething, vibrating with supernatural force. This body had the same scars as Jonathan; the same tattoos. But if I looked too long in this peculiar state I became terrified: his face was obviously a mask; underneath it could be anyone.
If I shook my head and quickly looked away it would release the spell. I knew it was a sick game but—alone with him in my room—I kept playing it.
Jonathan passed the time sipping water and SMS-ing threats to Agbeze, which the older man treated with the utmost composure and concern. He had shown me one of Agbeze’s responses, tilting the screen of his phone toward me so I could read it myself:
MY GOD KNOWS I HAVE NOT TOUCHED YOUR PASSPORT. I HAVE DONE EVERYTHING TO LOCATE IT FOR YOU. ASK MY WIFE AND MY CHILDREN I HAVE NOT SLEPT A NIGHT SINCE IT WENT MISSING. PLACE YOUR FAITH IN GOD, JONATHAN. PLEASE KEEP FAITH.
“And he says he hasn’t slept?” Jonathan snorted as he showed me the SMS. “What kind of man is this? If I had lost his passport I would not be sleeping or eating ONE DAY; I would be running around like chicken.” At this he pointed both of his index fingers and wagged them side-by-side in imitation of a runner. “And what is he doing? Going to classes? Preaching at the African bar? I am beginning to think this is a very bad man, Agbeze. I am believing this priest that he sold my passport to someone and I will not rest until he tells me what he knows.”
By the time night fell Jonathan was senseless with hunger and an old paranoia was rumbling up inside me that the pills could not put down. The noise carried over from a wedding party in the street below seemed loud and too much and yet the sounds muffled together with Jonathan’s speech in a way that made me feel like I was groping to understand anything. My bedroom was stifling, full of hot dead air. When Jonathan moved his arm suddenly to swat a fly I drew my knees into my chest and screamed.
“What the fuck is wrong with you!” he yelled. He jumped up and left the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. When he finally returned more than an hour had past. He had showered and reeked of my sweet lime and cedar Jo Malone.
“Are you wearing my perfume?”
“It’s called cologne. Jo Malone makes cologne.”
“Did you go through my things?” I hadn’t moved from my fetal position, but was looking up at him with my one eye that wasn’t buried by the pillow.
“I borrowed a bit of your cologne, okay? I need to get the hell out of this apartment.”
Hm. So he was ready to break his fast? “I could scramble you up some eggs.” I said it weakly, but it was still a peace offering.
I was standing in the kitchen and had already begun cracking the eggs over a bowl when I felt his eyes on me. I turned around. Jonathan was studying me from a folding chair in the hallway from which he had displaced a pile of laundry. My silk, hand-wash blouses were now occupying the tile floor alongside the dust and dead bugs.
“What? What is it this time?”
“I don’t want to eat any eggs, okay? I’ve changed my mind—all I want is fufu.”
Jonathan had insisted on walking and that is how we landed on Street 63, amid the food stalls of the night vendors on our way to the No Name. Each vendor had a long halogen light illuminating a Plexiglas box of food—fried cricket, candied meat, mystery noodles. The lights hung above the stalls at fractured, warring angles like sparring light sabers. There were dozens of these vendors crowded up and down the street and the combined effect of all that akimbo halogen was that even the sky appeared to be fighting.
When we reached the corner I noticed a motorbike driver, a “motodop,” as they call the hired drivers in Cambodia, leaning against the seat of his parked bike, smoking. “Lok kmoa,” I thought I heard the man say as we passed by.
At first we kept on arguing. Every time Jonathan accused me of lacking faith I took a broader interpretation: he was calling me an infidel. I was hell-bent on explaining to Jonathan what I, a white person, believed in, when I heard the driver say
it again, much louder this time and to our backs for we had passed by him and were now walking away: “Lok kmoa.”
Black man.
I grabbed Jonathan’s hand to guide him around the corner, into the African bar, but it was too late.
“Say it again, man, say it again.” He had spun around to face the motodop.
The man leaned his head over the handlebars of his bike and by the sound of things was working up a full mouth of spit. Then he hocked it out, letting the loogie dangle from his lips and then slowly detach. When it hit the ground he looked straight at Jonathan with bloodshot eyes. Only then did it occur to me that the driver was high. “Lok kmoa,” he repeated, adding in English, “Why you come to my country? Why you don’t go back your country?”
This is when Jonathan snapped. And by snapping I mean he took something out of his messenger bag; something I didn’t know he had.
Jonathan was a crack shot. The motodop stumbled backwards and fell against his Honda. His slight body was enough to rock the bike against the gate behind it but not to knock it from its stand. He slumped down against it, his back in its tattered cotton shirt coming to rest against the bike’s metal exhaust pipe.
“He’s going to burn himself!” I screamed. There were still aspects of my mind that were working logically but the logic belonged to a different situation all together than the one I was in. Two fruit sellers conferring on the opposite corner had scooped up their baskets. The women—one with the primatal loping gait of a clubfoot—were now scuttling toward the alleyway.
“Move!” Jonathan shouted. He pointed the pistol towards the ground and with his free hand made a grab for me. The motodop had not stirred since collapsing against his bike. One of the man’s arms rested lightly across his chest and blood bloomed from underneath his hand. I clocked all of this before looking aghast at Jonathan, or whatever entity said it was Jonathan and was wearing his heavy mask.
“You’re coming with me to the bar,” Jonathan ordered. “You and Agbeze—I want to see you put your heads together.” He yanked me hard by my arm and I stumbled along behind him.
From here on out everything I remember comes in tunnel vision: the wide-eyed face of the Cambodian passer-by who would no sooner call for the police than pay the bribe for summoning them; the cheap electronic readout that flashed “PUB,” and, incongruously, “BISTRO”; Jonathan’s leopard tattoo; the way the cat’s paw leapt across the tendons of his forearm as he flexed his hand and pushed aside the blackout curtain.
There were two men seated together at the bar and a bar girl, alone in the corner, dancing with her own reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. Chike, the bartender, his hands braced against the bar, was leaning in convivially chatting with the two customers. The fat red jalapeño lights strung up around the bottles of whiskey and gin conspired to make the whole scene somehow homey. Jonathan had kept the gun behind my back as we entered through the curtain. It must have looked to the people in the room like he had his arm around me.
“Haffa!” Chike turned his head and winked at us. I hung back when Jonathan stepped forward. He held his right hand at his side with his left hand clasped over it; when the men looked down he quickly lifted his hand to flash the pistol.
“Ibuzor! What is this?” Agbeze had called him by his tribal name. The President’s eyes flicked over the two of us and then settled back on Jonathan. “There’s no need to bring her into this.”
Jonathan snorted: “You think I don’t know she’s been talking to Freedom? You think everyone who passes through this bar”—he made a pinching motion in the air as if plucking the hairs off invisible heads—“hasn’t told me about the two of them?” Heat flushed across my thighs. “The three of you?”
I didn’t understand. Agbeze shot a glance at his companion and the man moved one of his legs off the rung of the bar stool, touching the tip of his shoe to the floor like a runner. When Jonathan turned around to grab me the man rushed for the door at the back of the room. I noticed the bar girl had vanished but Chike had barely deviated from his original position: he had moved one hand behind the counter but the other hand was still steadily gripping the wood grain of the bar, same as it had been when he was deep in conversation.
“Freedom?” Agbeze countered, “What does this have to do with Freedom?” The President was obviously trying to attach a face to the name.
“Don’t you know!” Jonathan shouted. He shoved me down onto the empty stool next to Agbeze. “Why don’t you ask her? Freedom is gone and so is my passport and she has a very beeg stack of money in her apartment!”
I racked my brain. I did, in fact, have a very big stack of money in my apartment: three thousand dollars squirreled away in a bronze Estée Lauder case. I had been running up my credit card with cash advances—so Jonathan could fly to Australia as soon as he had his passport back.
On some level I had wanted to be rid of him.
“Listen, my friend, you are not thinking clearly.” Spreading his palm wide, Agbeze held one arm out at his side in deference but I already knew he was taking the wrong tack: betrayal, real or imagined, has a life of its own. Like a pill, it begins its work of changing who we are from the moment it is swallowed.
Jonathan could not afford his troubles. I had stepped in to rescue him, forever changing the dimensions of the game. Pride was now on the table. Fealty was on the table. With each play Austin had sunk deeper out of sight until no one could say plainly how it started: with unavenged death and with rumor. With pain, without the civilizing force of sympathy. I had watched, poker-faced, as Jonathan withered and distorted. I had exoticized his world because his world—if not Jonathan himself—was outside the boundaries of my compassion. Part of the seduction of being an ex-pat was getting to skip along the surface of a chasm as deep as culture. We were swimmers who had not allowed for the possibility of drowning and it made us heed less—with our own bodies as well as the strange bodies we flailed against.
Chike never took his eyes off the pistol. When Jonathan laid his hand on Agbeze it was Chike who put an end to it.
When I was a little girl I stepped on a bee in our backyard. My mother had warned me not to go barefoot, but I had disobeyed. The sensation of being stung was at first so foreign that I leapt onto my other foot but did not cry out. It wasn’t until I looked down and saw the crumpled bee, stiff in his signature jacket, that my shock mutated into tears.
I remember my mother scooping me up in her arms and taking me inside. Great hiccupping sobs rose from the sofa where she had laid me down to operate. All the while she worked out the stinger with a pair of tweezers I was crying. As she swabbed my heel with alcohol, I was crying. Finally, exasperated, my mother turned on me: “I know it doesn’t hurt that much!” she snapped.
That shut me up; I swallowed my own sobs. The pain was still there but I let it slide down to all the strange places, to wet backlit caverns where it would later crystallize and hang from my very bones.
Jonathan is in Cambodian jail now and the nearest Nigerian Embassy is still in KL. I still file two stories a week for Bloomberg—Uighurs deported to China; new hydropower dams choking off the Mekong—but these are other peoples’ stories. When I think of Jonathan, I try to remember him as he was before he suspected me.
On one of our first dates he asked if he could “crest” me. I asked him what it meant, crest? He said, “To crest is to draw, baby. I’m going to draw you all right? Hold still.” I was sitting across from him in a Vietnamese restaurant and I remember vamping—holding my chopsticks to my lips as he scribbled with his pen across the paper placemat that came under our bowls of pho.
When he was done he turned the placemat around to show me. It was a good likeness: he’d captured my long face, my almond eyes. But he had also drawn a riot of decorative ferns, devouring my head like a mane. The plant’s leaves drooped over my ears and forehead and made me look telescoped and jungley.
“What’s all this?” I asked, pointing to the ferns.
“It’s a p
lant that grows in Nigeria. It’s kind of like—how do you say it—a Touch-me-not? But instead of closing to touch it closes to sound. But there’s only one thing you can say that will make it close. You have to say, Your husband is coming, your husband is coming . . . When you say those words”—he snapped his fingers together like a clam shell—“the plant will hide.”
For a long time I thought this was just another of Jonathan’s stories, but a few weeks ago it occurred to me to look it up: the plant, of the species M. Pudica, is also known as “Sensitive Plant” and when “touched” by these words does, in fact, fold its leaflets neatly inward like a row of collapsing dominoes or a venetian blind being drawn up smoothly by its cord. I do not cry anymore when I think of Jonathan, but I cried when he told me the story about the plant in Nigeria and I am crying now, as I think of it again, but for different reasons. This is where my story is located: on the shy tips of that shadowy fern. This is where my story is filed away.
DAVY ROTHBART
Human Snowball
FROM The Paris Review
ON FEBRUARY 14, 2000, I took the Greyhound bus from Detroit to Buffalo to visit a girl named Lauren Hill. Not Lauryn Hill, the singer who did that song “Killing Me Softly,” but another Lauren Hill, who’d gone to my high school, and now, almost ten years later, was about to become my girlfriend, I hoped. I’d seen her at a party when she was home in Michigan over the holidays, and we’d spent the night talking and dancing. Around four in the morning, when the party closed down, we’d kissed for about twelve minutes out on the street, as thick, heavy snowflakes swept around us, melting on our eyebrows and eyelashes. She’d left town the next morning, and in the six weeks since, we’d traded a few soulful letters and had two very brief, awkward phone conversations. As Valentine’s Day came near, I didn’t know if I should send her flowers, call her, not call her, or what. I thought it might be romantic to just show up at her door and surprise her.