Henderson the Rain King

  “No, I’m all right. How am I doing?”

  “Wonderfully, my brother Henderson. Believe me, it will prove beneficial. I will lead Atti away and let you take rest. We have done enough for the first time.”

  We were sitting on the trestle together and talking after the king had shut Atti in her inner room. He seemed positive that the lion Gmilo was going to turn up very soon. He had been observed in the vicinity. Then he would release the lioness, he told me, and end the controversy with the Bunam. After this he began to talk again about the connection between the body and the brain. He said, “It is all a matter of having a desirable model in the cortex. For the noble self-conception is everything. For as conception is, so the fellow is. Put differently, you are in the flesh as your soul is. And in the manner described a fellow really is the artist of himself. Body and face are secretly painted by the spirit of man, working through the cortex and brain ventricles three and four, which direct the flow of vital energy all over. And this explains what I am so excited about, Henderson-Sungo.” For he was highly excited, by now. He was soaring. He was up there with enthusiasm. Trying to keep up with his flight made me dizzy. Also I felt very bitter over some implications of his theory, which I was beginning to understand. For if I was the painter of my own nose and forehead and of such a burly stoop and such arms and fingers, why, it was an out-and-out felony against myself. What had I done! A bungled lump of humanity! Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho! Would death please wash me away and dissolve this giant collection of errors. “It’s the pigs,” I suddenly realized, “the pigs! Lions for him, pigs for me. I wish I was dead.”

  “You are pensive, Henderson-Sungo.”

  I came near holding a grudge against the king at that moment. I should have realized that his brilliance was not a secure gift, but like this ramshackle red palace rested on doubtful underpinnings.

  Now he began to give me a new sort of lecture. He said that nature might be a mentality. I wasn’t sure quite what he meant by that. He wondered whether even inanimate objects might have a mental existence. He said that Madame Curie had written something about the beta particles issuing like flocks of birds. “Do you remember?” he said. “The great Kepler believed that the whole planet slept and woke and breathed. Was this talking through his hat? In that case the mind of the human may associate with the All-Intelligent to perform certain work. By imagination.” And then he began to repeat what a procession, of monsters the human imagination had created instead. “I have subsumed them under the types I mentioned,” he said, “as the appetite, the agony, the fateful-hysterical, the fighting Lazaruses, the immune elephants, the mad laughers, the hollow genital, and so on. Think of what there could be instead by different imaginations. What gay, brilliant types, what merriment types, what beauties and goodness, what sweet cheeks or noble demeanors. Ah, ah, ah, what we could be! Opportunity calls to rise to summits. You should have been such a summit, Mr. Henderson-Sungo.”

  “Me?” I said, still dazed by my own roaring. My mental horizon was far from clear, although the clouds on it were not low and dark.

  “So you see,” said Dahfu, “you came to me speaking of grun-tu-molani. What could be grun-tu-molani upon a background of cows?”

  Swine! he might have said to me.

  It was vain to curse Nicky Goldstein for this. It was not his fault that he was a Jew, that he had announced he was going to raise minks in the Catskills and that I had told him I was going to raise pigs. Fate is much more complex than that. I must have been committed to pigs long before I laid eyes on Goldstein. Two sows, Hester and Valentina, used to follow me about with freckled bellies and sour, red, rust-gleaming bristles, silky in luster, stiff as pins to the touch. “Don’t let them loll in the driveway,” said Frances. That was when I warned her, “You’d better not hurt them. Those animals have become a part of me.”

  Well, had those creatures become a part of me? I hesitated to come clean with Dahfu and to ask him right out bluntly whether he could see their influence. Secretly investigating myself, I felt my cheekbones. They stuck out like the mushrooms that grow from the trunks of trees, those mushrooms which prove to be as white as lard when you break them open. Under my helmet, my fingers crept toward my eyelashes. Pigs’ eyelashes occur only on the upper lid. I had some on the lower, but they were sparse and blunt. When a boy I had practiced to become like Houdini and tried to pick up needles from the floor with my eyelashes while hanging upside down from the foot of my bed. He had done it. I never managed to, but that was not because my eyelashes were too short. Oh, I had changed all right. Everybody changes. Change is ordained. Changes must come. But how? The king would say that they were directed by the master-image. And now I felt my jowls, my snout; I did not dare to look down at what had happened to me. Hams. Tripes, a whole caldron full of them. Trunk, a fat cylinder. It seemed to me that I couldn’t even breathe without grunting. Brother! I put my hand over my nose and mouth and looked with distressed eyes at the king. But he heard the guttural vibration of the vocal cords and said, “What is the peculiar noise you are making, Henderson-Sungo?”

  “What does it sound like, King?”

  “I don’t know. An animal syllable? Oddly, you look well after your exertion.”

  “I don’t feel so well. I’m not one of your summits. You know that as well as I do.”

  “You show the work of a powerful and original although blockaded imagination.”

  “Is that what you see?” I said.

  He said, “What I see is greatly mixed. Fantastic elements have fought forth from your body. Excrescences. You are an exceptional amalgam of vehement forces.” He sighed and gave a quiet smile; his mood was very quiet just then. He said, “We do not speak in blame terms. So many factors are mediating. Fomenting. Promulgating. Everyone is different. A billion small things unperceived by the object of their influence. True, pure intelligence does the best it can, but who can judge? Negative and positive elements strive, and we can only look at them and wonder or weep. You may sometimes see a clear case of angel and vulture in collision. The eye is of heaven, the nose gives a certain flare. But face and body are the book of the soul, open to the reader of science and sympathy.” Grunting, I looked at him.

  “Sungo,” he said, “listen painstakingly, and I will tell you what I have a strong conviction about.” I did as he said, for I thought he might tell me something hopeful about myself. “The career of our specie,” he said, “is evidence that one imagination after another grows literal. Not dreams. Not mere dreams. I say not mere dreams because they have a way of growing actual. At school in Malindi I read all of Bulfinch. And I say not mere dream. No. Birds flew, harpies flew, angels flew, Daedalus and son flew. And see here, it is no longer dreaming and story, for literally there is flying. You flew here, into Africa. All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! You see,” he said, “I sit here in Africa and devote myself to this in personal fashion, to my best ability, I am convinced. What Homo sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. Oh, Henderson, how glad I am that you are here! I have longed for somebody to discuss with. A companion mind. You are a godsend to me.”

  XIX

  Around the palace was a vegetable and mineral junkyard. The trees were niggardly and grew with gnarls and spikes. Then there were the flowers, which also lay in the Sungo’s department. My girls watered them and they thrived in those white hollow stones. The sun made the red blossoms extremely sleek and taut. Daily, I would come up from the den all shaken by my roaring, my throat grated, my head in fever and my eyes like wet soot, weak in the legs, and especially delicate and trembling in the knees. All I needed then was the weight of the sun to make me feel like a convalescent. You know how it is about some people when they convalesce from wasting diseases. They become strangely sensitive; they go around and muse; little sights pierce them, the
y get sentimental; they see beauty in all the corners. So, watched by all, I would go and bend over those flowers, I would stoop hopelessly with my eyes of damp soot at the bowls of petrified mineral junk filled with soaked humus and sniff the flowers and grunt and sigh with a sort of heavy, beady wretchedness, the Sungo pants sticking to me and the hair on my head, especially at the back, thriving. I was growing black curls, thicker than usual, like a Merino sheep, very black, and they were unseating my helmet. Maybe my mind, beginning to change sponsors, so to speak, was stimulating the growth of a different man.

  Everybody knew where I was coming from, and I presume had heard me roaring. If I could hear Atti they could hear me. Watched by all, and watched dangerously by enemies, mine and the king’s, I lumbered out into the yard and tried to smell the flowers. Not that they had a smell. They had only the color. But that was enough; it fell on my soul, clamoring, while Romilayu always came up behind to offer support, if needed. (“Romilayu, what do you think of these flowers? They are noisy as hell,” I said.) At this time, when I must have seemed contaminated and dangerous due to contact with the lion, he did not shrink from me or seek safety in the background. He did not let me down. And since I love loyalty beyond anything else, I tried to show that I excused him from all his obligations to me. “You’re a true pal,” I said. “You deserve much more than a jeep from me. I want to add something to it.” I patted him on the bushy head—my hand seemed very thick; each of my fingers felt like a yam—and then I grunted all the way back to my apartment. There I lay down to rest. I was all roared out. The very marrow was gone from my bones, so that they felt hollow. I lay on my side, heaving and groaning, with that expanded envelope, my belly. Sometimes I imagined that I was, from the trotters to the helmet, all six feet four inches of me, the picture of that familiar animal, freckled on the belly, with broken tusks and wide cheekbones. True, inside, my heart ran with human feeling, but externally, in the rind if you like, I showed all the strange abuses and malformations of a lifetime.

  To tell the truth, I didn’t have full confidence in the king’s science. Down there in the den, while I went through the utmost hell, he would idle around, calm, easy and almost languid. He would tell me that the lioness made him feel very peaceful. Sometimes as we lay on the trestle after my exercises, all three of us together, he would say, “It is very restful here. Why, I am floating. You must give yourself a chance. You must try….” But I had almost blacked out, before, and I was not yet prepared to start floating.

  Everything was black and amber, down there in the den. The stone walls themselves were yellowish. Then straw. Then dung. The dust was sulphur-colored. The skin of the lioness lightened gradually from the dark of the spine, toward the chest a ground-ginger shade, and on the belly white pepper, and under the haunches she became as white as the Arctic. But her small heels were black. Her eyes also were ringed absolutely with black. At times she had a meat flavor on her breath.

  “You must try to make more of a lion of yourself,” Dahfu insisted, and that I certainly did. Considering my handicaps, the king declared I was making progress. “Your roaring still is choked. Of course it is natural, as you have such a lot to purge,” he would say. That was no lie, as everyone knows. I would have hated to witness my own antics and hear my own voice. Romilayu admitted he had heard me roar, and you couldn’t blame the rest of the natives for thinking that I was Dahfu’s understudy in the black arts, or whatever they accused him of practicing. But what the king called pathos was actually (I couldn’t help myself) a cry which summarized my entire course on this earth, from birth to Africa; and certain words crept into my roars, like “God,” “Help,” “Lord have mercy,” only they came out “Hooolp!” “Moooorcy!” It’s funny what words sprang forth. “Au secours,” which was “Secoooooooor” and also “De profooooondis,” plus snatches from the “Messiah” (He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, etcetera). Unbidden, French sometimes comes back to me, the language in which I used to taunt my little friend François about his sister.

  So I would roar and the king would sit with his arm about his lioness, as though they were attending an opera performance. She certainly looked very formal in attire. After a dozen or so of these agonizing efforts I would feel dim and dark within the brain and my arms and legs would give out.

  Allowing me a short rest, he made me try again and again. Afterward he was very sympathetic. He would say, “I assume now you are feeling better, Mr. Henderson?”

  “Yes, better.”

  “Lighter?”

  “Sure, lighter, too, Your Honor.”

  “More calm?”

  Then I would begin to snort. I was all jolted up within. My face was boiling; I was lying in the dust, and I would sit up to look at the two of them.

  “How are your emotions?”

  “Like a caldron, Your Highness, a regular caldron.”

  “I see you are laboring with a lifetime accumulation.” Then he would say, almost pityingly, “You are still afraid of Atti?”

  “Damn right I am. I’d sooner jump out of a plane. I wouldn’t be half so scared. I applied for paratroops in the war. Come to think of it, Your Highness, I think I could bail out at fifteen thousand feet in these pants and stand a good chance.”

  “Your humor is delicious, Sungo.”

  This man was completely lacking in what we all know as civilized character.

  “I am sure that you soon will begin to feel something of what it is to be a lion. I am convinced of your capacity. The old self is resisting?”

  “Oh yes, I feel that old self more than ever,” I said. “I feel it all the time. It’s got a terrific grip on me.” I began to cough and grunt, and I was in despair. As if I were carrying an eight-hundred-pound load—like a Galápagos turtle. On my back.”

  “Sometimes a condition must worsen before bettering,” he said, and he began to tell me of diseases he had known when he was on the wards as a student, and I tried to picture him as a medical student in white coat and white shoes instead of the velvet hat adorned with human teeth and the satin slippers. He held the lioness by the head; her broth-colored eyes watched me; those whiskers, suggesting diamond scratches, seemed so cruel that her own skin shrank from them at the base. She had an angry nature. What can you do with an angry nature?

  This was why, when I returned from the den, I felt as I did in the torrid light of the yard, with its stone junk and the red flowers. Horko’s bridge table was set up under the umbrella for lunch, but first I went to rest and get my wind back, and I would think, “Well, maybe every guy has his own Africa. Of if he goes to sea, his own ocean.” By which I meant that as I was a turbulent individual, I was having a turbulent Africa. This is not to say, however, that I think the world exists for my sake. No, I really believe in reality. That’s a known fact.

  Each day I grew more aware that everybody knew where I had spent the morning and feared me for it—I had arrived like a dragon; maybe the king had sent for me to help him defy the Bunam and overturn the religion of the whole tribe. And I tried to explain to Romilayu at least that Dahfu and I were not practicing any evil. “Look, Romilayu,” I told him, “the king just happens to have a very rich nature. He didn’t have to come back and put himself at the mercy of his wives. He did it because he hopes to benefit the whole world. A fellow may do many a crazy thing, and as long as he has no theory about it we forgive him. But if there happens to be a theory behind his actions everybody is down on him. That’s how it is with the king. But he isn’t hurting me, old fellow. It’s true it sounds like it, but don’t you believe it. I make that noise of my own free will. If I don’t look well, that’s because I haven’t been feeling well; I have a fever, and the inside of my nose and throat are inflamed. (Rhinitis?) I guess the king would give me something for it if I asked him but I don’t feel like telling him.”

  “I don’ blame you, sah.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. The human race needs guys like this king more than ever. Change must be possible! If not, it??
?s too damn bad.”

  “Yes, sah.”

  “Americans are supposed to be dumb but they are willing to go into this. It isn’t just me. You have to think about white Protestantism and the Constitution and the Civil War and capitalism and winning the West. All the major tasks and the big conquests were done before my time. That left the biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death. We’ve just got to do something about it. It isn’t just me. Millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place. Just before I left home I saw an interview in the paper with a piano teacher from Muncie who became a Buddhist monk in Burma. You see, that’s what I mean. I am a high-spirited-kind of guy. And it’s the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I’m out here, anyway?”

  “I don’ know, sah.”

  “I wouldn’t agree to the death of my soul.”

  “Me Methdous, sah.”

  “I know it, but that would never help me, Romilayu. And please don’t try to convert me, I’m in trouble enough as it is.”

  “I no bothah you.”

  “I know. You are standing by me in my hour of trial, God bless you for it. I also am standing by King Dahfu until he captures his father, Gmilo. When I get to be a friend, Romilayu, I am a devoted friend. I know what it is to lie buried in yourself. One thing I have learned, though I am a hard man to educate. I tell you, the king has a rich nature. I wish I could learn his secret.”

  Then Romilayu with the scars shining on his wrinkled face (manifestations of his former savagery) but with soft sympathetic eyes which contained a light that didn’t come from the air (it could never have penetrated the shade, like an umbrella pine, that grew across his low forehead), wanted to know what secret I was trying to get from Dahfu.