The Darling

  Until the late-winter night that he came banging on our door at two A.M. When I let him in, he collapsed on the floor in the hallway, bleeding through his jacket, and I knew right away it was from a bullet wound. I’d seen enough of them in the emergency room at Peter Bent Brigham not to confuse a bullet wound with any other kind of injury—it was usually the face of the victim that gave it away, scared, in pain, but mainly surprised. Zack had that look.

  I helped him to his feet and led him into the kitchen, where he let go of all restraint and like a child terrified by a nightmare—suddenly awake and safe in his own bed—began to sob. Carol and I carefully removed his torn, blood-soaked jean jacket and shirt, and I saw that the bullet had gone cleanly through his shoulder and seemed to have missed bone and arteries.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks, but you’ve lost some blood. You’re going to have to get to the hospital,” I told him.

  “No! I can’t! You fix it!” he cried, as if I were his mommy.

  “Why can’t you go to the hospital?” Carol asked him.

  “Jesus, you tell her,” he said to me.

  Bettina had come into the kitchen and stood by the door in her pajamas, looking scared and confused. “Carol, take care of Bettina,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” Carol obeyed and scooted Bettina towards her bedroom. “Zack’s okay, honey!” I called to the child. “He just had an accident, that’s all!”

  I knew enough anatomy and emergency first aid to clean the wound quickly and staunch the bleeding, and when Zack had recovered himself sufficiently to ask for whiskey—a line he probably took from a Western movie—I knew he’d not lost as much blood as I’d feared.

  “You going to tell me what happened?” I asked and poured him a teacup of Jim Beam.

  Carol had returned to the kitchen, and Zack jerked his head in her direction. “I’ll have to tell you later, man.”

  “Carol, please, we need some privacy,” I said.

  “This is weird,” she said. She walked back into the living room, flipped on the TV, dropped herself onto the sofa, and sulked.

  “Oh, man, she drives me crazy sometimes. Now, Jesus, you. Fucking public enemy number one.”

  Carol flipped off the TV, got up, and stuck her head into the kitchen. “I’m goin’ to bed, Don. You comin’?”

  I was at the sink scrubbing the bloodstains out of Zack’s jean jacket and denim shirt, and shot her a dirty look. Then felt sorry for it. All she wanted from me was a little straightforward affection mixed with respect—no reason to treat her like a dumb dog. The bedroom door closed behind her, and Zack was already talking.

  He’d blown it, he explained, blown it big time, and we were going to have to leave the apartment, get out of New Bedford, out of the country, probably. We not only, as always, had the FBI sniffing after us, but now we were also being hunted down by these black guerillas from New York City, Zack’s very heavy dudes who, he had suddenly discovered, were not Maoist revolutionaries after all, but gangsters, bank robbers, drug dealers. “The real thing, man!”

  He’d tried to draw a line, he said, on dealing drugs, specifically heroin, and in Newark, on the way to make a buy, they’d had an argument, a misunderstanding, actually, based not on money, he assured me, but principles. Although they had thought it was about money, which is why the misunderstanding had gotten out of hand, so to speak, and they’d suddenly turned on him. He was lucky to have gotten out of there and back here alive, he said. And now these guys were more dangerous to us than the FBI was, because he knew stuff about them that no one else did, and they knew our names and where we lived, the city of New Bedford, at least, but not the actual street address, he assured me. So we had a little time, maybe a day or two, before they came knocking on the door.

  “What the hell do you mean us and we? What the hell did you tell them about me?”

  “Nothing, man, just your name in passing, you know, on account of the Weather thing. I mean, you think you’re only a peon in the Movement, but you’re well known, man, a poster girl. You were sort of like my bona fides, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Who are these people anyhow? I mean, really? I thought they were SLA or Black Liberation Army. Borderline, but more or less legitimate.”

  “Well, yeah, I guess at first I did, too. But they sort of work both sides of the street, play one side off against the other. Look, Hannah, I got confused…”

  “Dawn.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Dawn. But you know what I mean. Christ, half of Weather and half the Panthers are FBI informers. Half the Klan is on the federal payroll. The Muslims killed Malcolm, and J. Edgar Hoover probably had Martin killed, and who the hell knows who killed Bobby and JFK? Probably LBJ. The point is, there’s nobody left who isn’t wearing some kind of disguise. So who do you trust?”

  “You trusted these New York guys, obviously. And I guess they trusted you enough to let you know too much.”

  “Mistake. Big mistake. On both parts, mine and theirs.”

  In a strange way, I felt almost relieved that everything seemed to be coming undone, and it was difficult not to show it. “Do they know me as Hannah Musgrave or Dawn Carrington? Or both?”

  “Oh, no, just Hannah Musgrave, your poster-girl name,” he said, but I knew he was lying.

  “What about Carol?”

  “She’s cool. I never mentioned her. No reason to.”

  That much I did believe. To Zack, Carol and Bettina were like my houseplants. “Where will you go?”

  “Way I figure, it’s gotta be back to Ghana, man. Tomorrow. I’ve got enough bread to get me there, and I know how to get by okay in Accra. It’s a very cool city, man, especially for Americans.”

  “Lucky you. But where am I supposed to go? Tell me that. I’ve got less than a month’s pay in my checking account, and then I’m broke. And I can’t just walk out on Carol, not without at least leaving her enough for the goddamn rent. This is fucking ridiculous, Zack!”

  “No, no, it’s not. You should come with me to Ghana. I feel guilty for this, man. Really. I’ll pay your way; it’s the least I can do. I’ll make a stop at the friendly family trust officer in Boston in the morning, and we can be taking off from Logan on Air Ghana by lunchtime.” He said he knew people in Accra who would find me a job. As it happens, people with my skills, hospital skills, Harvard Medical School skills, were highly employable in Ghana.

  “It’s a chance to start over.” He passed his gaze over the apartment. “This, all of it, everything you’ve got here, this slummy apartment, the little girlfriend, the job at the hospital, even the bomb-making in the basement—it may be your way of stopping the War Machine, it may even be your way of starting the Revolution. But it’s bullshit.”

  “You didn’t think so yesterday.”

  “Yeah, well, yesterday I had more time to play with, time for finding out what’s bullshit and what isn’t, and yesterday I hadn’t been shot yet by a crazed, paranoid black guy who couldn’t tell the difference between liberating the people and selling them drugs. I’m outa here in the morning, and with this arm and the painkillers that you’re gonna score for me at Peter Bent Brigham, I’ll need someone to drive for me. We can commandeer my cab and drop it off at the airport, and twelve hours later we’ll be kicking back in Accra.”

  I stood and walked to the window and looked down at the wet, gray street and the triple-decker houses that lined it on both sides. It was five-thirty in the morning. The sky was pinking in the east, out beyond the bay—in the direction of Africa. It must be midday in Africa, I thought. The street below seemed cold and colorless, as if it existed only in grainy black and white, and the radiators hissed and banged as the coal-burning furnace in the basement kicked in, and the darkened hallway smelled of corned beef and cabbage and moldy, wet, threadbare carpeting on the stairs. An empty municipal bus began its roundup of the first-shift mill workers. I could see my car down on the street where I’d parked it, the beat-up old Karmann-Ghia I’d bought in Cleveland. I’ll leave the car key
s on the kitchen table for Carol, I decided. And a check for what’s left in my account.

  “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go with you,” I said. “Providing we go now, this minute. If I wait around, I’ll change my mind.”

  “Cool. What about Carol and the kid? Doncha wanna wake them up?”

  “No. Let’s go now. I’m basically all packed anyhow. I’ve been packed for months. Half expecting this, I guess.”

  “No shit? Don’t you want to say goodbye?”

  “I hate goodbyes.”

  “Man, you are cold.”

  “Who is? Hannah or Dawn? No, you’re right,” I said and started towards my workroom to get the duffel with my belongings. “I am cold. Both Hannah and Dawn, we’re like icebergs.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, well, you’ll see, man. Africa’s gonna melt you.”

  AND SO, LIKE water following gravity, my course and rate of descent more or less determined by the lay of the land and by whomever or whatever happened to lie in my path or by my side, I came to Ghana, a place that on my mental map of Africa was located in the region marked “unexplored.” When you let go of your life like that, unexpected turns occur, and before long your life’s path has become a snarl of zigs and zags. It’s how one comes up with what’s called “an interesting life,” I guess. And my brief stay in Ghana with Zack was merely that, another zig, another zag—the makings of an interesting life.

  It was more complicated than that, of course, but I didn’t realize it at the time it was happening. One never does. I was, in a sense, passively following Zack, who knew how to disappear safely and, as it turned out, comfortably in far-off Ghana. But he wasn’t leading me, and he certainly wasn’t dominating me. He was a facilitator, one of any number of people who could just as easily have played the role as he. Or the role of comrade-in-arms. Or lover. Back then they were all essentially the same to me.

  The truth is, I used Zack. Just as I had used Carol. I wasn’t as passive as I seemed. Almost without knowing it I’d reached a point, long before I ran out on Carol and fled New Bedford, where I wanted desperately for my old life to be over and a new one to begin. But I had no idea how to go about it—without turning myself in to the FBI. And there was no way I’d do that.

  It wasn’t the likelihood of spending a year or three or even more behind bars that kept me from turning myself in—I might actually have welcomed jail time, a few years to reflect and pay mild penance; a time to organize my warring memories into a coherent narrative. It would have meant publicly voiding my previous life, however, canceling it out, erasing all its meaning, and I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. My life so far had cost me and everyone who ever loved me and everyone whom I had loved too much, way too much, for me simply to say, “I’m sorry, Daddy, and I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry, everybody. I have for more than ten years been making a terrible mistake. And, oh yes, everyone who was led to believe that I was someone other than I am, my apologies to you, too. It was all a dumb mistake, Carol. All of it.”

  And besides, I had no better alternative life to propose. No meaningful future for me alone or me with anyone else. So it was jail time, and public confession and shame, or get the hell out of Dodge, lady. Disappear. I was like a late-stage drug addict, unable to admit her addiction because of the damage it has done. She goes off the map altogether and no longer associates even with other addicts. I grabbed my duffel bag and my phony passport and followed Zack to Ghana. That way I could keep my mask, and no one could see it for what it was. Except Zack.

  WITHIN A WEEK of our arrival in Accra, we had rented from an ex–Peace Corps friend of Zack’s a small, two-bedroom, second-storey furnished apartment in a pink stuccoed building downtown, with a balcony overlooking the bustling street below and a view of the vast, open-air Makola market. Another week, and I had a job. Zack seemed to have friends everywhere in this city, at all levels of society—expatriate Englishmen, Ghanaian nationals, African-Americans in search of their roots, American businessmen, and ex–Peace Corps volunteers gone native—and he managed through a pal at the U.S. embassy to get me hired as a medical technician for a New York University blood lab that was using monkeys and bonobos for research on hepatitis.

  My job was essentially a clerical one. I worked with the blood, not the monkeys, cataloguing and shipping plasma back to the States. I barely saw our simian donors and never handled them. Two years of Harvard Medical School under the name of Hannah Musgrave and my job, later, in the plasma lab at Peter Bent Brigham as Dawn Carrington had qualified me nicely for a similar, difficult-to-fill position here. In the days before computer checks, nobody checked. You could take off, put on, and mix and match identities like sportswear. You got caught only if you couldn’t do what you said you could. Or if someone informed on you.

  Once I had my job and living quarters settled, it wasn’t long before Zack and I began to fall away from each other. Mostly, it was my doing. Back in the States—starting at Brandeis and finally in New Bedford—I’d been willing to dismiss his egoism and grandiosity as the typically elaborate feathers and coxcomb worn by just about every man I’d ever known in the Movement, without lowering my estimation of his political commitment and integrity. But that wasn’t possible here in Ghana. For ten long years, in the vain attempt to create a revolution, I and hundreds of women like me—and, yes, men like Zack—had literally risked our lives and sacrificed our families and friends and given up on the comfortable futures we’d been promised. It was who we were back then and now and who we’d be for the rest of our lives. We believed it. We insisted on it. We needed it. But for Zack, once we’d landed in Accra, all that turned into merely a stage in his life, a phase he claimed to have passed beyond.

  I wouldn’t have been offended by his having designated those years a phase instead of a life, implying that it had been merely a phase for me, too, and I might even have been grateful for it. It might have provided the start of a way out for me. But in Africa, Zack quickly set himself up as a “businessman” of a particularly embarrassing and loathsome type. At least to me it was, especially then. And that, in turn, flipped him into a defensive posture, which only made things between us worse. For a long time, I said nothing to him about it. But he knew. My presence silhouetted his new life sharply against the brightly lit background of the old, and it made him angry at me, as if I were in charge of lighting.

  He’d become a middleman. The bottom-feeder of capitalism. The enemy, as far as I was concerned. The Ghanaian economy had collapsed in the middle 1970s, and the inflation rate of the cedi, the local currency, was doubling by the month against the U.S. dollar. Small farmers and merchants were slipping so deeply into debt it would take generations for them to climb out again. These were Zack’s suppliers. He spoke Fanti and a little Twi from his Peace Corps days, and as soon as his shoulder had healed well enough for him to drive, he bought with the dregs of his trust fund a little red Suzuki motorcycle and roared off to back-country cocoa-farming villages and along dusty country lanes from one small market town and city to another and prowled up and down the back streets and alleys of Accra, buying up from desperately frightened debtors their last hedge against financial ruin—ancient Ghanaian artworks and religious artifacts, principally Ashanti gold. He bought the precious objects with American dollars at flea-market prices, then sold them the next day at a colossal markup to the agents and dealers for rich American and European collectors and galleries, who waited for him in the air-conditioned lobby of the Golden Tulip Hotel out by the airport. It was, as he said, “sweet.”

  He was thriving, and within a month he had bought himself a Mazda van to carry his goods. I remember sitting with him one afternoon at a beach bar called Last Stop that he liked and had made his informal headquarters. It was a Sunday and very hot, and he had talked me into meeting him there “For the breeze,” he said, “if nothing else. Who knows, you might actually enjoy yourself for a change and meet somebody you’d like and maybe even fall for.” For some reason, Zack was eager to see me involved with
a man. “Or a woman,” he said. “Doesn’t matter to me, so long as you get your own pad if you decide to shack up with him. Or her. Two’s company, three’s a drag.”

  We sat out on the terrace and drank the local Gulder beer and watched a gang of small boys and girls chase the surf while their tall, slender mothers stood knee-deep in the water with their skirts pulled up and talked. The breeze off the sea was aromatic and cooling. I kicked off my sandals and showed my face to the sun and admitted to Zack that I was glad I’d come out there.

  “Yeah. Too bad there’s nobody interesting here today. Probably still too early.” He’d completed a successful sale that morning of a half-dozen rare, elaborately carved chieftain’s stools to a midtown Manhattan gallery and was more pleased with himself than usual. “Actually, this gig’s going so good I’m thinking of setting up a gallery of my own here, with maybe a branch in the States in a year or two. Cut out the middleman, you know?”

  “You’re the middleman,” I said. “Jesus, Zack, do you have any idea how you sound?”

  “Look, there’s no more trust fund, babe,” he said, spreading his empty hands. “Same with you, y’know. No more checks from Mommy and Daddy waiting at the American Express office. This is Africa, babe, not Ameri-ka. So lighten up, will you?”

  “I never took money from my parents, you know that. And don’t call me ‘babe.’”

  He scowled. “You put me down all the time, but look at you, for Christ’s sake. Taking U.S. dollars from a university lab that’s financed by a U.S. pharmaceutical company that’s trying to patent and sell a drug that cures a disease that’s been inflicted on the liver of some poor African-American woman who’s addicted to another drug that’s imported by the CIA from Southeast Asia. Terrific. I suppose that’s better than being an upscale African street peddler like me? Because that’s all I am, you know. A street peddler. I mean, c’mon, Hannah, which of us is really working for the enemy?”

  “Dawn.”

  “Hannah. We’re not underground anymore.”