The Shell Collector

  She’d run until she couldn’t feel her legs moving beneath her, until past and future seemed to dissolve and there was only Naima—all the attention of the seething, tossing forest on her— and she’d feel a reckless urgency to accelerate, to run beneath the clouds and feel her core blaze into life; some rare nights, as she neared the end of a trail, she felt the shed of her body slip away, and for one electrifying moment she became a ray of light, speeding upward. It wasn’t dissatisfaction as much as curiosity; it wasn’t a fear of stasis as much as a need for movement. But those things—fear and dissatisfaction—were there too. She could not sit still; she hated picking tea; she dreaded school.

  As Naima grew older she watched friends marry friends; young men assumed their father’s jobs; young women became versions of their mothers. No one, it seemed, left the places they lived, the roads they traveled. At nineteen, at twenty-two, she was still racing through the forests, crawling through brambles, scrambling up riverbanks. Children called her mwendawazimu; the tea pickers treated her as an outsider. By then Mkondo had become more than a game; it was the one way she could be certain she was alive.

  Then Ward had arrived. He was different, significant; he spoke of places she had only dreamed of, he carried himself with a delicacy she had not seen before. (Ward stepping out of his truck, staring shyly at his feet, scraping at a fleck of clay on his shirt with a fingernail.) The gifts, the attention, the promise of something different, something glamorous—all these things attracted her. But it was not until he had leapt after her into the river that she was convinced. It was dark; he easily might have turned back.

  On the plane she opened her eyes. This, she thought, this marriage, this one-way ticket to another continent, was just another round of Mkondo; it was only a matter of steeling yourself and taking that extra, final step.

  Ohio: bleak weather impended over the city like a shroud. Curtains of haze washed out the light; helicopters shuttled endlessly overhead; buses groaned through the streets like dying beasts. In Ward’s neighborhood the houses were built within a foot of each other—Naima could lift a screen and reach into the neighbors’ kitchen.

  For those first months she threw herself so ardently into Ward that she managed to outrun her disappointment. It was love, the most desperate kind. She spent her afternoons glancing at the clock once a minute, waiting for the moment his bus would let him off at the end of the block, the sound of his keys at the door. Evenings they ran through the streets, dodging lampposts, hurdling newspaper boxes. Sometimes they stayed up until dawn talking; when Monday morning came—too soon—Naima wanted to hammer the door shut, bury his keys, pin him against the hallway floor.

  Although the museum was not what she expected—cracked granite staircases, mounted mammals and bones on display, dioramas where plastic-eyed cavemen bent over plaster cookfires— she could see why Ward had such ambition for it. It was a musty, wistful place; a vision of what that country must once have been. They sat on the roof at night and watched traffic slug through the streets; they picnicked inside the fossilized rib cage of a brontosaur. In a marble hall the walls were covered with almost fifty thousand pinned butterflies, species from every region on earth. The colors on their wings took her breath away: dazzling blue halos, tiger stripes, false eyes. Ward beamed, named them one by one. It was his favorite place. Even later, after he had been promoted several times, he would return to the hall of butterflies to dust them off, straighten their labels, inspect new additions.

  But the more time she spent there the more the museum unnerved her. Nothing grew, nothing lived. Even the light seemed dead, falling from naked bulbs screwed into the ceilings. The people there obsessed over names and classifications of things, as if the first orange-winged butterfly had emerged from its cocoon named Anthocharis cardamines, as if the essence of ferns was explained by a dried specimen tacked to posterboard and labeled Dennstaedtiaceae. The curators had taken Ward’s prehistoric bird, taped an index card to it, and locked it in a glass cube. What kind of natural history was that? She wanted to haul in barrows of earth and dump them on the floor. See this grub? she’d announce, shaking one at the old guard, at the visiting class of first-graders. See these slugs? This is natural history. This is what you come from.

  Traffic, billboards, sirens, a stranger’s unwillingness to look directly at her: these were not things she had expected, not things she could have prepared herself for. The leaves of trees—the few trees she could find—were stained with soot from the mills. The markets were lifeless and sterile: meat came packaged in plastic and she had to tear it open in the aisle to smell it. The neighbors pretended not to stare when she did laundry in the yard. You need something, she told herself, wringing Ward’s shirts over the lawn. You need something or you are not going to make it here.

  Ward watched Naima drift through the house as if searching for something she’d lost; sometimes she complained of strange illnesses: invisible clamps around her throat, thick-headedness, rubbery insides. Once he brought her to dinner at an acquaintance’s house, a Kenyan professor at the university. It will do you good, Ward told her. The professor’s wife cooked chapatis, murmured hymns in Swahili. But Naima sat sullenly at the table and gazed outside. After dinner, when they took tea in the parlor, she stayed in the kitchen and sat on the floor, whispering to the housecat.

  At night Ward tossed in self-loathing: how, he wondered, can you want something so badly, finally get it, and yet wind up discontented? And how can it happen so quickly? When he finally could sink into sleep his dreams boiled with faceless devils; he woke—gasping—with their talons on his windpipe.

  Ward was changing too, or perhaps just reverting to something he had been before, easing back to a more familiar road. After only six months in Ohio, Naima could see the flush in his neck fade, the definition of his muscles wilt. She watched him tangle himself in the trappings of work: he’d return home at eight or nine, sheepish and apologetic. He brought paperwork home on weekends; he was placed in charge of museum publications, then membership management. I love you, Naima, he’d say, standing in the doorway to his study. But already he was not the same person who had arrived at her parents’ door like a stag in rut, breathing hard, trembling with life.

  They made love carefully, and in silence. Nothing ever came of it. Are you okay? he’d say afterward, panting, suddenly afraid to touch her, as if she were a flower he’d torn the petals from—an accident, too late. Are you okay?

  Her first February the weather stayed overcast every day all day. She felt the dead weight of snow on the roof; she rolled over each morning, lifted the curtain and groaned to see it gray again, never any sun, never any movement to the air. A mile away the flat and dismal towers of downtown stood against the sky like huge prisons. Buses roared through the slush.

  She had come to Ohio; she had taken that final, extra step. Now what? she thought. Now what am I supposed to do? Turn back? By August—she had been there a year—she was sobbing at night. The Ohio sky had become a tangible weight, bending the stalk of her neck, loading down her shoulders. She slumped through the hours. Ward, anxious to try anything, drove her out of the city: barns on hills, threshers in fields. They sat on a friend’s porch and ate fresh corn slathered in butter and pepper. She asked, What are those white boxes over there?

  Bees. So all winter she hammered together frames in the basement and in April bought a queen and a three-pound package of workers from a farm supply store and set up a hive in Ward’s backyard. Each evening, with a canvas veil over her head, lulling the bees with smoke from smoldering bunches of grass, she’d stand over the hive and watch it in all its industry, all its wildness. And she was happy. But the neighbors complained—they had kids, they said, and some of the kids were allergic. The bees were infesting their forsythia bushes, their potted geraniums. A woman had bees coming through her air conditioner. The neighbors began leaving notes under Ward’s wiper blades, rude messages on the answering machine. Then: a threat of sabotage—How would your bees
take to some DDT?—taped to a glass paperweight and hurled through the living room window. Two cops stood on the porch with their hats behind their backs. City ordinance, they said, no bees.

  Ward offered to help her get rid of them but she refused. She had never driven a car. She stopped and started, nearly leveled two children on tricycles. Finally she stalled in a field off the interstate, opened the trunk and watched the bees spiral out, angry, confused, swarming. A dozen stung her: on the arms, a knee, an ear. She wept, hated herself for it.

  She stuck bird feeders to the bedroom windows with suction cups, lured squirrels into the kitchen with tea biscuits. She studied ants as they navigated the front walk, watched them heave the desiccated bodies of beetles onto their shoulders and freight them through the forest of the lawn. But it was not enough—it was not wilderness, not exactly, not at all. Chickadees and pigeons, mice and chipmunks. Houseflies. Trips to the zoo to watch a pair of dirty zebras eat hay. This was a life, this was how people chose to live? Somewhere inside she could feel winds dying, the gales of her youth stifled. She was learning that in her life everything— health, happiness, even love—was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul. There were doldrums in her arteries, gray skies in her lungs. She heard a pulse inside her ear, a swishing cadence of blood and it was time, the steady marking of every moment as it sailed past, unrecoverable, lost forever. She mourned each one.

  Winter—her third in Ohio—she crossed to Pennsylvania in Ward’s Buick and returned with a pair of immature red-tailed hawks, orphans bought from a chicken farmer who had shot their mother and advertised them in the paper. They were fully fledged, hot and bristling, with hooked beaks and sharp black talons and fire-colored eyes. She lashed leather rufters over their heads and tied them to a wooden block in the basement. Each morning she fed them cubes of raw chicken. As a kind of training she carried them around the house, hooded, perched on a heavily gloved wrist, stroking their wings with a feather and talking to them.

  The hawks were full of hate. At night wild cries reverberated from the basement. Naima would wake and experience the strange sensation that the world had inverted—the sky arched beneath her, the hawks were circling in the basement, shouting up. She lay in bed and listened. Then, all too familiar, the phone would ring: the neighbors wondered why it sounded like children were shrieking in Ward’s cellar.

  She was learning: wildness was not something she could make or something she could bring to her, it had to be there on its own, a miracle she had to be lucky enough to happen across, traveling one day along a path and arriving at its end. She went to the birds each night. She carried them to opposite ends of the basement, stroked them with the feather and talked to them in Swahili, in Chagga. But still they squalled. Can’t you just muzzle them? Ward would shout from his study. Until they outgrow this? But hatred was not something they would outgrow, it was in them; she could see it brimming behind their eyes.

  After a week of this, the neighbors calling and the police summoned twice to the front step, Ward sat her down. Naima, he said, the police are going to take the hawks away. I’m sorry.

  Let them come, she said. But that night she carried one of the birds to the backyard, removed its hood, and set it free. It flapped clumsily into the air, trying its wings, and settled onto the gable. There it began to screech, sharply and regularly, like a siren. It hammered at the roof with its beak, sending scraps of shingle into the air; it dropped to the front porch and threw itself at the front window. Then it perched on the mailbox and resumed screaming. Naima ran around to the front, thrilled, breathless.

  Five minutes later the police were shining flashlights in the windows. Ward stood on the sidewalk in his sweatpants, shaking his head, gesturing at the screeching hawk, which was now perched on the gutter. Porch lights up and down the block switched on. Two men in coveralls pulled their truck onto the lawn and tried to snare the hawk with long-poled nets. It screamed at them, dive-bombed their heads. Finally, at the peak of the noise, sirens wailing, men shouting and the bird crying savagely at them all, there was a gunshot, an explosion of feathers, and afterward, a silence. A sheepish cop reholstered his handgun. What was left of the bird fell in a lump behind the hedges. Fragments of feather drifted up, spinning into the darkness.

  She waited until the police were gone and the neighbors’ lights had gone out. Then she went downstairs, took the other hawk and set it free in the backyard. It lifted drunkenly into the sky and vanished over the city. She stood in the yard, listening, watching the spot in the haze where she had last seen it, a black speck against a field of gray.

  It has to stop, Ward said. What will you haul in here next? A crocodile? An elephant? He shook his head, circled his wide arms around her. In just three years his body had become soft enough to repulse her. Why not go to college? he’d say. You could walk to campus. But when she imagined college she thought of her dreary days in the schoolhouse in Lushoto, the heat of classrooms, the impatience of mathematics, bland two-dimensional maps pinned to walls. Green for land, blue for water, stars for capital cities. Schoolmasters obsessed with naming things that had existed unnamed for a million years.

  Every day she went to bed early and slept late. She yawned: huge, widemouthed yawns that seemed to Ward not so much yawns as noiseless screams. Once, after Ward left for work, she climbed onto the first city bus that stopped and rode it until the driver announced last stop; she found herself at the airport. She wandered the terminal, watched the names of cities shuffle up and down the monitors: Denver, Tucson, Boston. With Ward’s credit card she bought a ticket to Miami, folded it into her pocket and listened for the boarding calls. Twice she walked to the jetway but balked, turned around. On the bus back she found herself crying. Had she forgotten how to take that extra step? How had it happened so quickly?

  She complained about the humidity in the summer and the cold in the winter. She claimed illness when Ward offered to take her to dinner; he’d tell her something about the museum and she’d look away, not even pretending to listen. Without thinking about it she referred to the house—still, after four years—as his house. It’s our house, Naima, he’d insist, thumping the wall with his fist, our kitchen. Our spice rack. He began to wonder if she’d leave; he became certain he’d wake one day and find her gone, a note on the mantel, a suitcase missing from the closet.

  He’d come home late and meet her on the stairs. I had a lot of work, he’d say. And she’d go past him, out into the night, moving in the opposite direction.

  In his office he took a notepad from a drawer and wrote: I see now that I cannot give you what you need. You need movement and life and things I can’t even guess at. I am an ordinary man with an ordinary life. If you have to leave me to find the things you need, I understand. No one who has ever seen you run beneath the trees or hang on to the hood of his truck could ever again be entirely happy without you, but I could try. I could live, anyway.

  He signed the page, folded it, and stowed it in his pocket.

  The twining of their lives: born on different halves of the world; brought together by chance and curiosity; leveraged apart by the incompatibility of their respective landscapes. While Ward was sitting on the bus, heading home, his letter in his pocket, another letter, tucked into the guts of an airplane, shuttled from truck to truck, hand to hand, was waiting in their Ohio mailbox: a letter from Tanzania, from the brother of Naima’s father. Naima brought it in, set it on the counter and stared at it. When Ward came home he found her in the basement, on the floor, cocooned in an afghan.

  He waved a finger in front of her eyes, brought her tea that she did not drink. He pried the letter from her fist and read it. Her parents had died together, when a section of the road to Tanga gave way in a rush of mud, rolling the truck into a gorge. She had already missed the burial by a week but Ward offered to send her anyway: he knelt before her and asked if she’d like him to make arrangements. No answer. He laid his hands on her cheeks a
nd raised her head; when he released it, it fell back onto her chest.

  He slept beside her in his shirt and tie on the concrete floor. In the morning he took the letter he had written her and shredded it. Then he carried her to the car and drove her to the county hospital. A nurse wheeled her to a room and plugged a tube into her arm. She’d be okay, the nurse said, they would help her.

  But this was not the kind of help she needed: white walls, fluorescent lights, the smells of sickness and disease slinking through the halls. Twice a day they pushed pills into her mouth. She drifted through the hours; her pulse ticked slowly through her head. How many days did she lie with the television burbling, her heart emptied, her senses dulled? She could see the white moons of faces rising and falling as people bent over her: a doctor, a nurse, Ward, always Ward. Her fingers found the metal railings of her bed; her nose brought the sterile smells of hospital food: instant potatoes, medicinal squash. The TV hummed incessantly. Her sleep was gray and dreamless. When she tried to remember her parents she could not. Soon Tanzania would be gone from her altogether—like her orphaned hawks she would know no home except where she was kept, hooded and tied, against her will. What next? Would they come in and shoot her?

  Was it morning? Had she been there two weeks? She tore the tube from her arm, heaved her way out of bed and stumbled from the room. She could feel drugs in her body slowing her muscles, dumbing her reflexes. Her head felt like it was a glass globe resting precariously on her shoulders—one wrong movement and it would fall; it would take her the rest of her life to sweep up the pieces.

  In the hall, amid rolling gurneys and hustling orderlies, she saw lines of tape on the floor fanning out like the paths of her youth. She picked one and tried to follow it. After some time— she could not say how long—a nurse was at her elbow, turning her, shepherding her back to her room.