“This is my brother,” said Denis. “He needs a ride to Mbuu.”
I looked at Hand. Hand was supposed to lock the back doors. Denis’s brother was in the car and it was too late; we had no choice. Mbuu was on our way. We said hello to Denis’s brother. His name might have been Pierre.
We joined the highway with Denis’s brother in our backseat and his chatter neverending. We didn’t like him. Mbuu was twenty minutes away, and Pierre did not stop talking, in a language Hand couldn’t grasp completely and could not at first confirm was French. We got the impression, immediately, that Denis’s brother had seen his brother’s receipt of cash, and wanted some of his own.
Pierre used Abass’s line, that he needed cab fare to get back. Hand explained his demands to me. We laughed.
“So,” said Hand, turning toward him, “you want us [pointing to us, back and forth with his index finger] to pay to drive you [pointing to him] to Mbuu, so you can get back.”
Denis’s brother nodded emphatically. Denis’s brother was not very good at this. He didn’t know what Hand was saying. Hand laughed. “You are not such the clever guy,” said Hand. “Your brother he got all the brains, eh?” Hand was getting overcon-fident; the man knew no English, but continued nodding eagerly. “But you know why,” Hand continued, “we gave to your brother three hundred of the dollars American? Because he didn’t ask for it. You, you are crass—you know of this word, crass?—so no money you have coming.”
With that, the man began chattering again. We had no idea what he was saying, but his voice was impossible to bear—an uninterrupted belligerence to it that was sending me over the edge.
Like the police officer before him, this man had his hand in my backpack, which was still on the backseat. I reached back for it, telling him, with a tight grin, that I needed something inside. I brought it into the front seat, fished through it, found a comb and ran it through my hair in an elaborate way, demonstrating how badly I missed it, how badly in need of grooming I’d been, this night, driving in the black to Mbuu.
The man began talking again, but he had changed tacks: now he needed the money to go to Zaire. He had gleaned that we had donated to his brother’s designs on Chicago, and he assumed we were providing grants to all travelers.
—You should not demand our money so coarsely.
—You freely handed it to my brother.
—That is the point. Freely. Of our volition.
—You want me to wait to be given it.
—Yes.
—You want docility. You want me to appear indifferent to the money.
—Yes.
—And as a reward I am given my share.
—Yes.
—This is shameful.
—You know it is not shameful.
He and Hand barked back and forth for a while, making little headway. When Hand had talked him away from the Zaire plan, the brother became hungry. He thrust his palm between us.
“We have any food?” Hand asked me. From my backpack I produced a granola bar. The brother accepted it, didn’t open it, and did not stop talking, talking loudly, at us; he was a machine. We were approaching Mbuu, and he was getting desperate.
“Jesus,” I said, “is there any way we can ask him to stop talking?”
Hand turned to him, paused, and held up his hands in a Stop way. The man stopped. I sighed loudly. We turned up the radio.
—You throw me, Denis’s brother. You make us sad.
—My job is not to make you happy.
—Your job is to be human. First, be human.
—There is no time for being gentle.
—We disagree.
—You do more harm than good by choosing recipients this way. It cannot be fair.
—How ever is it fair?
—You want the control money provides.
—We want the opposite. We are giving up our control.
—While giving it up you are exercising power. The money is not yours.
—I know this.
—You want its power. However exercised, you want its power.
We were in Mbuu, a dark adobe village. There were no constant lines—everything was moving. The walls were moving, they were human. There were people everywhere and everyone was shifting. The homes were open storefronts. Our headlights flashed over hundreds of people, walking, watching TV—large groups or families visible through glassless windows, all in the open-air storefronts, eating their dinners, drinking at a streetside bar, everyone so close.
We stopped and said goodbye to Denis’s brother. He paused in the car, waiting. We stared at him. His eyes spoke.
—You owe me.
—We don’t.
—This is wrong.
—It’s not wrong.
—You’re not sure. You’re confused.
—Yes I am confused.
—It’s all wrong.
He stepped out and closed the door. We got back on the road, on our way back to Saly for dinner. We hadn’t eaten all day.
“I don’t feel bad about that,” Hand said.
“I hated that fucker.”
But nothing else in the world had changed.
* * *
It was early evening when we got back to the hotel. A hundred yards from the dining room we could hear the clinking of glasses and forks, the murmur of scores of people. Everything inside was white—the tablecloths, the flowers, the people. Chandeliers.
“Holy shit,” said Hand. There were two hundred people seated inside, a just slightly upper-middle-class sort of crowd, older, retirees, the kind you might see at the Orlando Ramada.
We were still in our travel clothes, everywhere stained, and a good portion of the diners were staring. We were dirty and Hand looked like a snowboarder too old for the outfit. His bandanna was now around his neck like a retriever’s.
We walked to the buffet and built ziggurats of chicken, rice and fruit on our clean white plates. The spread was impressive: one long table for salads, one for breads, one (particularly spectacular) table for fruits and cakes, and a meat, poultry and fish wing, staffed by three Senegalese men in chef’s hats. We sat down next to an older couple, who muttered to each other while glancing our way, and in ten minutes they left, amidst more muttering. A man in white took our drink orders. Desperate and unsure of the rules, we ordered six beers for the table.
“So about the multiverse,” I said.
“Oh.”
“It’s irrelevant. Who cares how many universes or planes there are when they don’t intersect?”
Hand had a whole drumstick in his mouth. He removed the bone and it was clean, plasticine. The place was pastel-pink and devoid of joy. There was no laughter, very little movement, countless sunburns. It had more the feel of a Florida nursing home cafeteria, on a Monday.
“Who said they don’t intersect?” he asked.
“Do they?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t read anything about that. But the thing you’d like is that with the multiverse, you have basically every option you want—really, every option you’ll ever see or imagine—and one of your selves somewhere has taken that option. Pretty much every life you could lead would conceivably be lived by one of your shadow selves. Maybe even after you die.”
He took another drumstick and removed all the meat, the veins, the gristle. He was fucking wretched.
“But it’s useless,” I said, “if you don’t share any consciousness.”
“Sure. I know. But then again, maybe we’re not dying. If you combine the quantum physics paradigm with the idea of the subjectivity of time, we’re basically all alive in a thousand places at once, for a neverending present.”
There was one black person eating—he was French, it seemed, sitting with a white woman, apparently his wife. But otherwise the dining room was entirely white and of a strikingly similar caste and appearance.
“The thing is, it’s basically immortality for atheists,” Hand said, “and we don’t need to wait for any sort of technology catch-up.
”
It did sound appealing. Consciousness or not, to be alive, always, somewhere. And what about dreams? That’s got to figure in—but what I wanted, really, was every option, simultaneously. Not in some parallel and irrelevant universe, but here. I wanted to stop and work at the field hospital and fall in love with the local beauty, but also be home in a week so I could do so many other things, fifty life-directions all seemed equally appealing and possible—shark wrangler! Whatever happened to training to be a goddamned shark wrangler?
A group of six walked in, three men and three women, all white but for one woman, who was black, tall, probably Senegalese.
“Wow,” said Hand, staring. She was shocking. Incredible posture, wearing a snug white dress over her astounding skin, lines drawn by the most optimistic and even hand—like the finest machines covered in polished leather. Hand had stopped eating. I stopped eating. Almost every Senegalese woman we’d seen looked like this: genetically flawless, robust, with regal bearing and skin like the smoothest stone.
“Stop staring,” I said.
“I won’t,” Hand said.
Half the dining room was watching. It was too obvious. We were thrown back to some other time or place. Was I imagining this? Everyone was watching this woman, either because she had crossed some understood racial line or simply because—I hoped—she made the rest of us look like trolls.
“She’s outstanding,” said Hand.
“She’s with them.”
“Yeah, but why?”
I had an idea but didn’t say it. The people she was with were too unimpressive for her. She was slumming. I could only imagine she’d have some other incentive, and hoped she hadn’t been bought.
—What are you doing with these men?
—I have my reasons.
—You need not be with these men. We will help you.
—Your help is not welcome.
—Our help is free of obligation. You must choose us.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’m done.”
We left, getting a better look at her on the way out—demure but with a smile like the thrusting open of curtains—and we dodged the white spray of the sprinklers on the way back to the room. Hand showered; I called my mom.
“Hello?” It was her on the first ring.
I swallowed my gum. I didn’t expect the phone to work, to reach Memphis without an operator. She was in the garden. She’d just come back from a cooking class.
“What day is it there?” I asked.
“Monday, dummy. We’re only seven hours behind you.”
“Eight, I think.”
“Greenland is more like seven, I think.”
“Oh, we’re not in Greenland.”
“You didn’t go?”
“We’re in Senegal.”
“That’s right. You told me that. So you caught anything yet?”
“Like what? Fish?”
“Just make sure you wear condoms. Six condoms.”
I cleared my throat.
“So how is it?”
“It’s good,” I said. “So good.” I told her what we’d been doing. I went on for a while. She had to stop me.
“I don’t need every last minute, hon.”
—You do.
“But that’s sort of the point,” I said.
“What is?”
“The every last minute part. We want you to care.”
“I care. I care. How much have you given away so far?”
“I guess about $1,000.”
“You’re going to have to quicken your pace.”
I told her about the basketball game.
“You give any to them?”
“One kid. $300 to him. He was a Bulls fan.”
“What about the other kids?” she asked.
“We gave them some water.”
“But what about money for them?”
“We couldn’t,” I said. “We couldn’t really spread it out evenly. There were at least fifteen of them.” I told her about Denis’s brother, who got in the car and who wouldn’t stop talking.
“You didn’t give him money, I don’t suppose.”
“No.”
“Honey.”
“Yes.”
“Why not just bring it back here and give it to a charity? There’s a place Cathy Wambat works with—they help poor kids get their cleft palates fixed. She would love to—”
“There’s a whole charity for cleft palates?”
“Of course.”
“But what makes that better than this?”
She sighed and left the line quiet for a minute.
“Don’t you think it’s all a little condescending?” she said.
“What?”
“You swooping in and—”
“Giving them cash. This is condescending.”
“Don’t get so angry.”
—It’s just such a stupid fucking word to use. There’s not one morsel of logic to that word, here. It’s a defense you use to defend your own inaction.
“Will, who says they want it?”
“Then they can give it to someone else.”
“Well, see—”
“The point is I don’t want it. And we like giving it. It’s a way to meet people, if nothing else.”
“So,” she said, “how do you decide who gets the money?”
“I don’t know. It’s random. It’s obvious. I don’t know.”
She laughed loudly, hugely amused. Then sighed. “That’s not really fair, is it, Will?”
“Denis’s brother was a dick.”
She laughed again, at me, without kindness. I couldn’t believe I was paying for this kind of aggravation.
“But it’s so subjective, dear,” she said.
“Of course it’s subjective!”
She sighed. I sighed. We waited.
—Tell me there’s a better way, Mom.
—I can’t. I don’t know of one.
“Why are you doing this to me now?” I said.
“I’m only asking questions, hon.”
—What are you saying? That we’re not allowed to see their faces? You’re saying that. You’re the type that won’t give to a street person; you’ll think you’re doing them harm. But who’s condescending then? You withhold and you run counter to your instincts. There is disparity and our instinct is to create parity, immediately. Our instinct is to split our bank account with the person who has nothing. But you’re talking behind seven layers of denial and justification. If it feels good it is good, and today, at the ocean, we met a man living in a half-finished hut, and he was tall and had a radio and we gave him about $700 and it was good. It can’t be taken from us, and you cannot soil it with words like condescending and subjective, fey and privileged words, and you cannot pretend that you know a better way. You try it! You do it! We gave and received love! How can you deprive us of that? I’m not asking them for thanks—we’re not even sticking around long enough to allow them it, and we don’t speak their goddamn language, anyway. We’re just wanting to see them, to touch their hands, to brush up against their arm or something. That is allowed! That cannot be explained away somehow, or turned around to make us look wrong or—
“Well,” I said, “your questions aren’t interesting to me.”
“I see. For that I apologize.”
“I just think you’re overthinking it, Mom.”
“I am prone to that sort of thing.”
“Oh really? I’d never noti—”
“Bye bye, smart mouth.”
She hung up.
Hand dressed and we scuffled back up the road. The sky was a planetarium’s half-dome ceiling, full of stars but not dark enough. The trees stood black underneath and against the grey sky, shadowing the dirt road with mean quick scratches. I was pissed. For every good deed there is someone, who is not doing a good deed, who is, for instance, gardening, questioning exactly how you’re doing that good deed. For every secretary giving her uneaten half-sandwich to a haggard unwashed homeless ve
t, there is someone to claim that act is only, somehow, making things worse. The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt—
“What are you muttering about?” Hand asked.
“Nothing.” I didn’t know I’d been muttering.
“Between that and the talking in your sleep—”
At a snack bar we bought ice cream. The woman at the counter had hair like a backup dancer and was watching dolphins on TV. Hand had an orange push-up approximation and I had a thick tongue of vanilla ice cream covered in chocolate, on a stick. I tore the thin shiny plastic and ate the chocolate first, then the white cold ice cream, so soft in the humid and darkening air, and it ran down my hand and throat at the same time.
As we walked under the infrequent streetlights we had two and three shadows, as one light cast our shadow up and the other down, sometimes overlapping. The lights didn’t know what they were doing. The lights knew nothing.
The moon was yellow and ringed with a pale white halo. There were small stones in my shoes. I stopped to empty them, leaning against Hand. When we began walking my shoes filled again.
The area around the resort was crowded with discos and casinos. We went to the main casino first, a small, though plush, one-room affair with two card tables and about thirty slot machines. We recognized about a dozen people from dinner; my face parted the crowd, and they looked at us with tired eyes.
“Check it out,” Hand said, pointing a finger at the clientele and casting an infinity symbol over them. “You notice anything about the men here?”
“The sweaters.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.”
Every man in the room, almost—there were about twenty men in this casino, most of them young, and twelve of them qualified—was wearing a cotton sweater over his shoulders, tied loosely at the collarbone. Twelve men, and the sweaters were each and all yellow or sky-blue, and always the tying was done with the utmost delicacy. You couldn’t, apparently, actually tie the sweater. It had to be loosely arranged, in the center of the chest, like a fur stole. It was about 85 degrees.
It hit me, again, that we were here. I’d never been farther than Nevada—with Jack and his family, for fourth-grade spring break, by car. We drove twenty-two hours, each way, leaving about seven in between, spent atop of horses that wanted us dead or in chains. Hand had been to Toronto, which was closer, actually, to Milwaukee, but he didn’t see it that way.