The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (18 page)

She gave a little bob of her head. “Yeah, the lifeguard is here and so are a million other people.” She sighed then, her first real sigh, and I let out a little echo sigh too and I could hear the sound of kids screaming, absolutely screaming. I have never screamed in a pool. I wouldn’t even know how to go about it.

We paid at the front: five dollars a person. I paid from my portion of the tips. Then we turned a corner and walked in and the pool laid itself out before us, faces to the screams now, old women in bathing caps and that one inevitable die-hard trying to do laps in the middle of a few people with closed eyes walking through the water calling out Marco! and Polo! I pointed out the lap guy and laughed. The girl didn’t seem to notice; she was very distracted with removing her towel and folding it into a nice square by the side of the deep end. She looked very pretty in her blue bathing suit, and I felt pleased to be at the pool with her. I took off my shirt and shoes and we both slid into the water at the deep end without much conversation. It was sort of cold, but the air was hot and the summer had been hot so there was a memory, too, of heat, so I enjoyed it. She held on tightly to the edge. She was straight down to business, no reaction to the temperature of the water at all.

She touched my arm lightly. “I can trust you?”

“Sure,” I said.

She shifted her weight from the side to my shoulder and I could feel her body slippery in the water next to me.

“I’m letting go,” she said, and, releasing my shoulder, she sank below the surface. I watched her hair rise up in seaweed strands and after a minute, I ducked down too, and I followed her to the bottom. The sounds were swallowed up and it was quieter and wider, with the space opening out, and most of what I could see first was just feet, actively thrashing feet above us. The girl stared at me, hair everywhere, feet flat on the concrete. We stared at each other. She was kind of insanely beautiful, underwater like that, in her mermaid way, and we looked at each other and I held out my hand to her, to help her back up.

She leaned against the side wall of the pool, bubbles slipping out of her mouth.

I made a little motion, up. I reminded her how to push up from her feet. She shook her head.

I made it again: Up! Try: up!

She shook her head again.

Why? I shrugged my shoulders.

She smiled at me, and stretched out her legs, like she was in some kind of living room.

Now I felt that growing impatience again, and the beginning of tightness in my lungs. I leaned closer, and she pulled me to her, put my fingers back to her neck, and the familiar pulse now came strong as ever, blumming its way through the water, hard and harder and strong as an elephant. Some kind of crazy heart that was. I took hold of her wrist and tried to pull her up but she kept resisting me, and instead she put her hand in my hair and pulled my face in close to hers, brushing her lips against mine, and almost against my will, I felt my body surge into hopefulness.

Up! I motioned again, but she shook her head, and I thought my lungs were going to burst so I swam to the top to breathe.

The air was full of people playing. Sunlight. She was down there, weirdly below me. Like my dream life or something. I waited for her to float up, but she didn’t. Sinking. I could feel the light imprint of her lips still on mine, and I took a deep breath and pushed my way back down.

She was still in the corner. She waved at me, sort of plaintively.

I moved in next to her, and she had me feel her pulse again, feel it blumming away while we brushed lips really lightly again, and then I put my arm around her waist, to bring her up.

She shook her head. Her lungs were insane.

Up, I motioned, helpfully, and she shook her head.

I shook my head back. Up! I motioned, and she closed her eyes, bubbles slipping out of her nose. I looped my arm around her back and she tried to shake me off but I tugged us up the best I could, kicking up to the top, breaking open into air, my arm around her slim blue waist. Both of us took in a deep breath—me sort of gasping and her regular—and then when I released her she sank straight down again, straight to the bottom of the pool.

“Fuck!” I said, and I dove down again, and she was already back in her corner, smiling. It was weird, that she was smiling. I went closer and she kissed me again. She was the first girl I’d kissed since Tessa, the first new girl in three years, and her lips were soft and warm, but different than Tessa’s, sort of differently shaped. Like the future, the way the future is new but familiar, too. She wanted me to hear her pulse again, but I shook my head. Time to go up! I indicated, and she grabbed my hand, to put it on her neck. I shook my head. No. Up! I said, come on! and then, like we were still in her living room, like she was trying to get me to stay and hang out in her living room after a long night’s visit, she looped her arms around my feet and planted them on the concrete.

And smiled up at me. Calm like that.

Up! I motioned. She shook her head and kept her arms around my feet, holding them to the cement of the pool bottom. I didn’t like this part. I didn’t get it. We were not in any kind of living room at all, and my lungs were growing tighter every second. I shook my head. No. I picked at her hand, but she gazed up at me, and then she sat her whole body down on my feet. My legs started to panic, and I kicked at her, trying to be as light as I could, to let her know to let me go, that I didn’t like this anymore, but she just sat there, fixing her eyes on me like she was a fish. Her eyes were steady and fine and it was blue and soundless down there and I stared back at her for a few seconds, trying to understand what she was doing, but she didn’t even move or do anything. I started to freak out, then, because there was something about the way she was looking at me, and really who the hell was she anyway, and my head was getting dizzy, and I kicked really hard, and lucky for me she was so thin and light because I could thrash her off me and get back to the surface where the air was waiting for me, and I dragged it into my lungs.

The world, still up there. Everybody in the world, doing their thing. All the sounds, busting into my ears. The smell of sun-tan lotion. All that activity. I felt, right then, a wash of aloneness more intense than I’d felt all summer long, with her still down there like some kind of bad memory, like something you want to brush out of your mind but can’t, and everyone in the world up here playing pool games and getting tan. I felt like the sky was going to kill me. I thought about leaving just then, just walking out and leaving but I couldn’t, and I took in another deep breath and went back down and swam to her waist and picked her up and she did feel incredibly heavy but I didn’t believe it, I didn’t believe her anymore, and we rose to the surface and broke into the air and I tried to keep my breathing from seeming too much, I tried to pretend my lungs were larger than hers, but my gulps of air were still big and I was still short of breath from before, and I was spitting water out, and after all that time under, she was breathing lightly and fine and cool and calm and collected.

“What do you think you were doing?” I said, words tumbling out as I brought her over to the side. “What’s with your lungs?”

She dipped her hair back into the water, evening it into a smooth line. “I was just seeing what it felt like, with someone else. I would’ve let you go. You didn’t have to kick like that.” She examined her shin. “I think you gave me a bruise.”

I shook my head. “You don’t hold someone down underwater,” I said. “Ever.”

“I’m tired,” she said.

I felt the anger boiling up. “Shut up,” I said. “Show me you can float, show me you can float, show me right now.”

“I’m tired,” she said.

I took hold of her wrist and squeezed it, hard. “Show me.”

She stared at me levelly, her eyelashes split up by the water. Then she held on to the edge of the pool, let her legs drift up, and released the grip of her fingers. She did a perfect backstroke across the deep end of the pool and then back. I watched her blue body blend with the chlorine. A volleyball kept smacking the water next to me and once I threw it back, any way I wanted, and I heard an indignant “Hey! This way, idiot!” and I watched her body floating like it was born in the water.

She came upright again and I was crouched at the corner of the pool and she looked up at me with big eyes and her legs just a hint of peach beneath her. She didn’t say anything. It was hard to imagine that we had ever kissed. I got out, dripping, and walked away and past the front gate. There was some kind of sickened feeling starting at my feet, creeping up from my feet and then twisting through my waist, and I didn’t want to look back, but I did, and as soon as she saw my head turn, she released the side of the pool and sank back down into the water. Like some kind of human anchor. There was no way in hell I was going back, but I still didn’t like the feeling. I knew I’d probably never see her again, and she’d just be there, at the bottom of the pool in my mind, pretty much forever.

At the gate there was a family trying to gain admittance. They hadn’t brought any money.

“It’s five bucks each,” said the gatekeeper, “for everybody.”

“But it’s a pool,” the father kept saying. “It’s a public swimming pool and my kids want to go swimming.” They stood behind him, one girl and one boy, the boy kicking rocks with his feet, the girl watching her father.

“Sorry,” said the gatekeeper, “this is a pay pool.”

The family stood there, at the gate. They didn’t turn away quite yet. The boy kicked a rock all the way into the street, quite a good kick. Another family with a wallet came forward and went in front of them. I was looking at the little girl and she was breaking my heart. She’d found a drip coming out of the pool pipes that was making a tiny puddle near the front entrance.

“Look here,” she said, dipping her toe into it, “look at me, Dad, I’m swimming.”

A Country Like No Other

"TIM?”

Nothing.

“Tim, this is bad.”

Daniel says this into the new darkness that has come in suddenly with strange bird calls and a restless murmuring of the forest. A few of the soldiers turn their heads but Daniel can barely see their faces now. He doesn’t know them by name anyway. There’s nothing left of the long blazing day behind them but the West African heat. It sits heavily amid the palm trees and radiates from the pitted asphalt road. Daniel lights a cigarette to see if anyone will tell him to put it out. For a minute or two no one says anything and he’s tempted to think maybe they’re not in such a bad spot until the captain makes a hissing sound from across the clearing. Daniel looks up and nods and stubs it into the sandy soil.

The soldiers are strung along the road in no particular formation. They’ve backed the armored personnel carrier up into the clearing and thrown some palm fronds over it. For some reason the stubby little barrel points out towards the road though Daniel can’t imagine anyone trying to approach that way. They’d come quietly through the trees and then suddenly the darkness would explode. Or at least that’s how Daniel imagines it. Tim finally walks over. Tim’s the photographer; he’s been through all of this before.

“What’s happening, mate,” he says. Tim’s Australian, he and Daniel have been together for a couple of weeks now.

“The waitress put us in the nonsmoking section.”

“It’s bloody ridiculous. They’re not even close.”

“Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re right over there.”

Tim looks around and shrugs. “You got any water?”

Daniel pulls a plastic water bottle out of his pack and hands it over. It’s half empty; they bought three bottles in town this morning before they came out here and two are already gone. “We’re obviously not going back tonight.”

Tim doesn’t answer, just settles down in the dirt beside Daniel. Tim’s had malaria twice and so he’s back on the Lariam pills that prompt a famously psychotic reaction in him. They give him bad dreams or bad ideas about the darkness. A few nights earlier he woke up shouting because an old lady was standing over him trying to put something in his mouth—a beetle or something. The old lady disappeared when Daniel jumped up and turned the light on. Tim got up and went into the bathroom and washed his mouth out anyway.

That was back in the rotting little capital that everyone was fighting over. The fighting was twenty miles outside of town. Taxi drivers refused to take them past the first cluster of charred cars that marked the high-water point of the offensive; beyond that the villages were gutted and the animals were dead. Once in a while there was a body in the ditch undulating with vermin and stinking up a half mile of road. That morning Daniel and Tim had driven as far as they could and then gotten out of the taxi and sent the anxious driver back and started walking. Everyone else was headed the other way, beautiful young black women with babies on their hips and children carrying bags and old ladies with aluminum pots on their heads for cooking and old black men with skin like ruined parchment. The old men had no expression, no comment on what was happening, but the old women were angry and they would rattle at you in the native Krio if you looked at them. The soldiers were the worst, they were nothing but teenagers and they drifted back from the fighting in small groups and then larger groups, out of bullets, out of food, out of whatever narrow sense of duty had put them out there in the first place. There were no officers among them and no radios and no discipline, even the villagers kept their eyes down when they walked past.

Tim and Daniel had eventually gotten a ride from a captain who was leading a detachment of forty kids in baggy uniforms. They walked double file behind the armored personnel carrier and the captain brought his machine to a stop and told his soldiers to check their papers and then waved them into the vehicles. The double steel doors opened in the back, and they stepped in and drove another hour until they could hear gunfire up ahead. The APC stopped and the kids spread out along the flanks of the road and then they continued slowly for another half mile. The sound turned Daniel’s insides heavy as lead but seemed to make Tim come alive. He double-tied his shoelaces and rechecked his cameras and zipped the pockets up on his photographer’s vest. He looked the part and he seemed to enjoy looking the part but he wasn’t the sort of arrogant prick that Daniel had braced himself for. He worked hard and he cared about people, which was more than you could say about a lot of journalists, and people liked him. Children gathered around him and laughed at things he did and teenage girls in town shot him shy, challenging looks as he walked through the market. Even the whores at the hotel seemed taken by him.

At one point the gunfire had suddenly become very heavy and very close and the APC stopped again and the gunner swept the turret barrel from left to right and back again to survey the jungle around them. The gun shot big fat rounds that exploded on impact and it could clear a lot of ground, but this was open palm forest with undergrowth along the road and the rebels could be anywhere. One good hit in the side of the vehicle would smoke all of them. The soldiers were tensed at a half crouch with their guns pointing ahead of them. They looked tentative and confused and utterly unready for whatever was about to happen. The captain said something in Krio and the APC started up again and the soldiers advanced, their faces blank and impenetrable and sweat making their foreheads gleam in the high sun. Daniel felt like throwing up.

It had turned out to just be celebratory fire at the town of Masiaka. Government militias—kids, really, just given guns and pointed towards the enemy—had stormed in that morning, but of course no one had radios so the captain had no idea who was doing the shooting up ahead. Apparently the militias had been expecting more of a fight and so when they got into town there was too much ammunition left. It was only a matter of time before someone started shooting it off into the air.

The APC had stopped at the edge of the main plaza and Daniel watched things get steadily out of hand. The captain looked powerless to do anything about it and didn’t even try. He told his men to keep their guns cocked. There were a few bodies clustered by what must have been an old colonial administrative building, and Tim wandered through the gunfire to take photos but Daniel didn’t want to leave the vicinity of the APC. He was the writer and he could see what was happening quite well from there. An argument developed between two militia commanders—Daniel later found out it was over who had done the most fighting—and very quickly guns were leveled and the plaza cleared and the captain backed the APC up and put his men in defensive position on the edge of town. The various government militias disliked each other almost as much as they disliked the rebels—in fact some of them had been rebels not that long before—and the regular army kept a healthy distance from all of them.

The shouting had died as quickly as it started and the guns came down and there were handshakes and the fighters moved on up the road. That was midafternoon. The captain decided that they shouldn’t proceed farther until reinforcements arrived. They sat in the shade for a few hours smoking and talking. Once in a while Tim would walk out to the road and peer in one direction and then the other and then come back shaking his head. He was hoping there was some way to get a ride back to town so he could file his photos, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen. They were there at least for the night. That was the good scenario.

NOW IT’S FULL DARK—no moon, even—and Daniel leans back against a palm tree and listens to the chatter of the forest. The sounds get quieter until there’s almost nothing but the low voices of the soldiers around him. An occasional bird screech somewhere, a rattle of insects. Tim is quiet, maybe he’s sleeping, and the soldiers are just shapes in the darkness. There are sentries somewhere out there in the bush but they’re probably asleep as well. For some reason there are no mosquitoes; back in Freetown there were swarms of them. Foul, ruined Freetown . . . children with no arms and packs of feral dogs on the white sand beaches and young men standing around with long knives in their belts. Daniel had been sent there several weeks earlier by an American newspaper to cover the peacekeeping efforts, but the situation fell apart almost immediately, and suddenly you couldn’t even go out at night without risking your life. The rebels were twenty miles outside of town and more were rumored to be in the city itself, just waiting for the signal to rise up. People in the city were jumpy and paranoid—the last time the rebels had gotten this close it had taken Russian mercenaries flying attack helicopters from their hotel lawn to drive them back.

“What do you think we should do?” Tim asks, breaking a long silence. Daniel is mildly surprised he’s asking his advice.

“I don’t know.” Not very journalistic of him, but it was the truth.

“We’re nowhere with these guys,” Tim says. “We’re not in town but we’re not out at the front either. We should’ve hooked up with those kids from this morning.”

“Are you joking?”

Tim rubs his forehead. “Aw, we’re white, they wouldn’t mess with us.”

“What makes you think that?”

Tim doesn’t answer.

“Listen, they have no problem—none—with the idea of killing, they barely even have a problem with the idea of
dying
. What possible motivation could they have to not mess with us?”

“You’re right,” Tim says sarcastically. “We’d better play it safe.”

Silence. Fuck you, Daniel thinks. He’s not nearly as experienced as Tim but he’s no idiot either. After college Daniel worked his way through various small-town papers and finally escaped his native Midwest six months ago by moving to Nairobi to try freelancing. A few weeks into it his girlfriend Jennifer was robbed at knifepoint, and within days she was on a plane home. He stayed. A couple of assignments came in. He was prone to shameful bouts of loneliness and the dismal conviction that he had no business being here at all. Which—he thinks, glancing through the darkness towards a road that leads north, basically straight into hell—he probably doesn’t.

“Do you have any food?” Daniel asks after a while.

“I don’t think we should eat in front of these guys,” Tim says. “They don’t have much. I wish we had the goddamn sat phone,” he goes on. “At least I could call my editor. He has absolutely no idea where I am.”

Daniel doesn’t respond—the satellite phone is back in the hotel because he, Daniel, forgot it there, a completely unprofessional move. Daniel doesn’t know what to say and so he just leans back and closes his eyes. A cigarette would help things tremendously right now. “Look, I want to get a story as much as you do,” he finally says. “I want to get a story and get out of here. But we have a responsibility—”

“I know, to our families, our newspaper.”

“To not get ourselves killed like a couple of assholes.” Daniel tries to say this with just the right amount of bravado, but the dismal truth is that the idea of going another hundred miles into this freak show is about the most frightening thing he can think of. Tim seems like he would do it with barely a second thought. There is no way to head into something this uncertain, this dark, and not be scared about the outcome. You have to abandon any real interest in the rest of your wonderful young life. Tim is married to a Czech girl in Paris who seems to put up with his shit and he has a couple of girlfriends scattered around Africa’s capitals and maybe at heart he really just doesn’t give a shit about anything.

“All right,” Tim declares, “how about this. These guys move forward, we go with them; they sit around for another day, we go back, file, and figure out what to do next.”

“No militias?”

“Not this time.”

Tim unscrews the cap of the water bottle and takes a swallow and re-caps the bottle and puts it away. “You’ll see, you’ll love it up there,” he says. “It’s beautiful country, I swear. I’ve been all over Africa. It’s a country like no other.”

Daniel doesn’t answer and neither of them says anything for a while. It must be around ten or eleven o’clock, five or six hours until dawn. “Do you ever get lonely out here?” Daniel finally asks. “I mean is this it for you?”

“Lonely? No, I guess not.”

“And your wife?”

Tim settles back with his hands clasped behind his head. “What about her?”

“You don’t miss her?”

“Not in the way you mean.”

“What way is that?”

Tim thinks for a moment. “Well, like I’d rather be there than here.”

GRAY LIGHT AND whooping bird calls. Low Krio voices. It’s dawn and the soldiers are stirring. Yesterday filters back into Daniel’s mind, leeching through some strange dream about his girlfriend that’s gone as soon as he tries to capture it. Ex-girlfriend. Daniel sits up, pulls the cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and slides one into his mouth. He finds a book of damp matches in his pocket and manages to light the third one. A cigarette goes a long way towards making something feel manageable. Daniel coughs and pulls on his cigarette and watches the soldiers stumble around in the growing light. Tim is still asleep next to him, apparently untroubled by Lariam delusions or the prospect of what is waiting for them.

When Daniel was a teenager he and some friends went out to a flooded quarry to dive off the cliffs. They dove at thirty feet and then at forty feet and then when the guys started talking about the high ledge—sixty feet or so—Daniel walked off into the woods to take a leak and just kept walking. There was no way he was jumping off sixty feet—even at forty feet, the acceleration was so out-of-control it felt almost malicious. He walked all the way home and never talked to any of those guys again.

Tim finally stirs and then sits up abruptly, looking around in puzzlement. Daniel watches him figure out where he is. Tim rubs his eyes and reaches for a cigarette. There’s no need to dress because they slept in their clothes; they even kept their shoes tied. You never know how quickly you’re going to have to wake up. The soldiers are shuffling around but there’s no food to cook so they have nothing to do but wait for orders. Before Daniel has finished his cigarette the captain comes over and Daniel and Tim stand up and the captain says that they’re going to move up the road back into Masiaka. They’re going to set up a command post and wait for reinforcements and food. Then he turns and walks away.