Gods for Sale by Patricia O'Donnell

     They took the early flight on a hazy Sunday morning from Cape Town to Jo’burg, then on to Nelspruit, where they were to drive a rental car to Kruger Park.  Americans, their eyes wide, still dazed after two days in Cape Town from hurtling to the other side of the world, from being upside down.  Everything was both more familiar and more strange than Elizabeth could have imagined.  At the airport gate in Cape Town they waited in line to board a bus that would drive them the few yards to the plane.  As they moved slowly forward Elizabeth saw a custodian smiling at the people ahead of them, moving his push broom at their feet as if displaying his sweepings.  Dreadlocks hung around his face and he smiled a shy, almost proud smile, glancing down at the floor then up at the white faces.  When she approached she saw that his sweepings were a giant mound of dead crickets, fat and black.  Where did they all come from?  How did they die?  No dirt, just crickets. One live one jumped and struggled over the mound, but the man pushed it gently back with his broom, and back again, all the while smiling at the people filing out into the African sunshine and onto the bus, on holiday. 

            It was while sitting on this bus, waiting, that Elizabeth became aware that she felt strange.  She had not slept much on the long flight to South Africa, or since they arrived.   Now she pictured a giant elastic band, attached to her center and pulling her back, to where it was attached on the other side of the world.  No wonder she felt queasy.

            Rob sat beside her, adjusting his Red Sox cap and glancing at the man across from him, who wore a Yankees cap.  The man paid no attention to Rob or his hat; he probably was not aware of the rivalry between the teams.  Here a Yankees cap was a style, an affectation.  Rob reached into his backpack and pulled out a book on Kruger wildlife.  On the cover two rhinoceros touched the sides of their horns together.  He had already read several books on South African history, and one on its vegetation.  The brown hairs of his forearms gleamed like fine shards of metal in the sunshine through the windows.  She read over his shoulder.  “So far, 147 species of mammals have been recorded in the Kruger National Park, the bulk (65%) being small species such as mice, shrews, bats, hares, etc.”  When Elizabeth closed her eyes she saw small animals—Maine mice, chipmunks—running helter-skelter through a field’s edge.  They scattered from feet crunching through the dry grasses; hiking boots, scuffed and dirty, stopping before a tall plant.  Hands reached to pull the plant from the ground, and with a jerk and a groan the bus rattled away from the terminal.

            The airport at Nelspruit was a wooden building, with a thatched roof.  A new building, made in the old style to charm rich visitors to Kruger Park.  White people, who drive their cars through the countryside, staring at the concrete huts dotting the hillside, wondering about the lives of the black men and women walking alongside the road.  They passed roadside stands selling fruit and vegetables, and as they got closer to their destination the offerings were less essential, aimed at tourists:  carved wooden animals, batiked cloths hung on trees, their bright colors flapping in the hot wind.  Rob stopped and they wandered in the dust, looking at the tall wooden giraffes, the carved white roosters, the colorful wooden birds.  A man eventually shuffled out from behind a shack, where Elizabeth saw other men squatting in a circle, lounging, smoking.  Smoke twisted into the bright air, incongruous, from a campfire.  The man nodded, murmured something.  “How much?” Elizabeth asked, gesturing toward the cloths.  “Hundred and eighty rand,” he whispered. 

Rob stopped before one of a charging elephant.  “I’ll give you a hundred for this,” he said.   The man shrugged, said nothing.

         On a table against the hut, carved narrow masks rested.  Three holes:  two eyes, and a mouth.  She was drawn to them; not anything she needed, but how could she resist?  Carved faces always seemed meaningful to her, always seemed to carry a message she couldn’t quite understand.  “Fifty rand,” the man said.  Less than ten dollars.  They were carved in patterns and stained different shades of brown, except for just one which was carved more bluntly, with no decorations, and painted bright colors:  black, green, yellow, red.  She didn’t know masks but it looked more genuine to her, more African. “That one forty rand,” the man said.  He said something else, which she couldn’t understand but which she imagined was “Ancestors.” And she pictured a spiraling twist of ancestors, like DNA, twirling back into infinity, attached to each of them by an invisible cord like an umbilical cord.  His ancestors taught their children to carve masks, to make faces for the ancestors to look through, to pass them on to people from the other side of the world, who pay rand.  On her chain was her grandmother, who taught her to make quilts.  Her father, who had died when she was five.  At the end of her chain of ancestors was her mother, who died four months ago.  Whose face, brown eyes thoughtful behind glasses, will never be seen again, whose voice she will never hear.  Who taught her to love, but didn’t teach her well enough.  When Elizabeth handed the man the two twenty-rand notes he grinned at her as if they shared a secret, and in the dusky hut his eyes glittered in his dark face. 

They were to spend the night at an expensive hotel outside the park gate, one Rob had chosen online.  Elizabeth thought it was too pricey, but since Rob was paying, she left it up to him.  Rob said they probably would never visit here again, and he wanted to do it right.  They were celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary.  For their honeymoon they’d traveled to Europe.  When they returned she became ill, with a virus that turned into a miscarriage.  It was to be the first of three miscarriages, before they decided they would never have children.  Rob said he was ambivalent about children, anyway, and this was probably a good thing.  Elizabeth pictured the word “miscarriage” as an old-fashioned stagecoach, elaborate and embellished, overturning on a dusty road, spilling its precious cargo. 

She knew, without speaking of it, that Rob hoped this trip would repair something in her, would help her heal.  He was a doctor, and an inveterate home repairman:  he believed in fixing things up.  It was clear to both of them that, especially since her mother’s death, Elizabeth needing some fixing up.  She thought that what was broken could not—or should not—be fixed, but she kept this thought to herself.  She adjusted her sunglasses and leaned back into the seat. 

         They stopped at the impressive gate to the hotel, where a woman approached Elizabeth’s side of the car with a clipboard in hand.  She stood, waiting for Elizabeth to speak.  “We have a reservation . . .” but the woman was gone, pushing a button which made the gate slide open.  Perhaps their skin color was reservation enough.

         Beyond the drive overhung with palm trees and ferns they parked next to a concrete fountain.  They followed a curving path into the lobby, which was one large elegant porch, open on all sides, under a high thatched roof.  The dark hardwood floor gleamed.  Under the roof Europeans lounged on overstuffed leather couches, drinking wine, chattering in Spanish and French.  While Rob spoke to people at the desk Elizabeth was drawn to a railing, overlooking a small stream.  Below her a small gray monkey scratched in the rocks at the water’s edge.  The creature looked over his shoulder now and then, nervously, at something in the brush.   A screeching noise erupted from behind him and the monkey scampered away.  It was only then that she saw what was close, just before her face:  the giant spider web, nearly eight feet across, strands shining golden in the slanting light.  At its center the spider, enormous, like a plastic Halloween spider.  Her eyes shifted focus and she saw the other webs behind it, two, three, each with their own giant spider in the glittering sun. 

         She jerked away, to a corner of the leather couch.  When Rob returned, holding the key to their cottage, she didn’t mention the spiders.  She followed him over a small wooden bridge, wondering if she was being selfish, not pointing them out, when all he would have to do is turn his head and see them hanging in their monstrous glory.  Instead she said, “I saw a monkey.  Down there,” and pointed to the spot of sand, now empty.

         They walked down a path to their cottage.  It was set back from the others, close to the trees and brush behind it.  It reminded her of the cabin her parents used to rent for a week in Minnesota, and the sense she always had there of being away from civilization, of being close to something mysterious and sacred and unknown.   There she would hear the call of the loons at night.  Now she sat still on a chair on the deck, listening to the rustling of leaves around her; was it the wind, or something else, stepping through the brush?  She caught a glint of metal and saw that the sturdy electrified fence extended behind their cottage, around the entire hotel area, penning them in and the animals out.

         They changed clothes and walked to a raised viewing platform which looked over the fence, into a dry river bed inside the park.  A uniformed waiter brought chardonnay for her and a gin martini for Rob.  Like the people at the desk and the maids pushing carts, the waiters and bartender were black; all the guests were white.  Rob surveyed the river bed through binoculars.  “Nothing,” he said, put them down, and smiled at her.  “Howzit?” he asked, a phrase they heard in Cape Town.  How is it, how are you, how are we.

         “Fine,” Elizabeth answered.  “It’s fine.”  The wine was good, the seats were comfortable, the sun was fading.  Still she kept her sunglasses on, and Rob put his back on too.  They were their masks, their shields.  She saw herself reflected, her blond hair bright.  In the glasses the streaks of gray didn’t show.  She looked out to the riverbed, where quiet animals could possibly be watching them.   From the corner of her eye she caught a movement, but it was a waiter, scanning the tables.

 

         They’d waited to marry until they were sure.  At the wedding the minister made jokes about Rob’s gray hair, but Rob laughed about it, saying the streaks of silver just made him more attractive.  Elizabeth’s mother said Rob was a “catch.”  Elizabeth wasn’t sure what she meant by that.  “Well, a doctor,” her mother said when pressed.  “What woman doesn’t want her daughter to marry a doctor?”   Rob used to come into the bookstore in Portland where she worked.  Over coffee, she told him that she’d like to run her own shop someday.  After they married, Rob financed her used bookshop, called “Twice-Told Tales.”

         One particular image from their honeymoon trip often occurred to her.  It was the view of a small Spanish town from the courtyard window of an ancient castle converted into a hotel where they spent the night.  The window was long and tall, with no casement or glass, and through it the Spanish town shone in late-afternoon sun.  She lost herself staring as she looked through it, feeling her mind go soft and blank with joy; it seemed as if she were swimming in beauty, as if she could reach through the golden air and touch beauty. 

There was movement in the brush beyond the dry river bed:  impalas, the white stripes of their flanks moving through the bushes.  Rob gave her the binoculars and she focused in on one lifting its head and looking in her direction.  She thought of her mother’s eyes, as she often did:  they just appeared before her, looking at her.  Her mother had been young once, had been beautiful and full of hope.  Her mother had thought her life would go on forever, that there would always be another chance.  Now she was gone, it was all over, and her daughter’s life went on, lived at the moment under the skies of another continent, under the Southern Cross. She would love to be here, Elizabeth thought.  Or anywhere, in the sunlight, with people she loved, with air to breathe.  With a day to enjoy.  It still seemed wrong to Elizabeth that her mother had no more days she could enjoy.  It made her feel anxious, as if she should do something to soak up the sunlight, to absorb her own life.  In the fading light Robert took his sunglasses off and reached for her hand to hold.  They rested there, a man and a woman motionless holding hands, until the pounding of drums announced dinner. 

         Maybe it was something she ate.  God knows she’d never eaten ostrich, springbok, or crocodile before, but there they were, spread out buffet-style on tables before her.  A young man wearing traditional dress, animal skin loincloth and leggings, with bare dark chest gleaming in the firelight, pointed out the dishes.  She filled her plate with small portions of each and sat at their table close to the fire flickering in a pit.  Though earlier she’d felt the pull of an elastic band tugging her back to the States, it wasn’t her stomach that bothered her that night in bed; it was her thoughts, exaggerated and restless.  She had another glass of wine in the cottage before she lay down next to Robert—was that it?  Or the malaria pills, taken the last three nights—it was probably the malaria pills.  She lay half-awake for hours, nerves jumping and brain filled with African visions.  Dark faces, breaking open in smiles, a softness to them here that she didn’t see at home.  An unfamiliar energy, a bursting African rhythm seemed to push the images up from her subconscious.  In her agitated state of mind when she thought of the faces it was as if she could see deeply into them, see past personality to the real person, the quick, the marrow.  The man in the hut, his dark eyes gleaming as he handed her the mask, whispering something about ancestors—yes, she was sure that’s what he’d said.  Ancestors.  He must have been a magic man, a sangoma, and he’d cast a spell on her.  By buying the mask she’d opened herself to the desires of her ancestors, or someone’s ancestors, those long gone, wanting to live again through her. 

         The curtain was open a crack, and in the faint light coming in she saw something small and dark on the opposite wall.  Just a shadow, she thought, until it moved suddenly, and she knew it was a lizard.  She pulled the sheet over her head.  Her blood was the beat of the drums, her feet were lizards, and her heart was the spider, moving its legs delicately on its web, hungry. 

She’d met Caleb during jury duty.  The Grand Jury, which met four times during the past year.  They sat together at the back of the room, exchanging whispered comments on the sordid dramas which unfolded before them like live soap opera.  He was an easy-going guy who wore flannel shirts, jeans and muddy boots to jury duty.   A guy who always needed a haircut and a shave, but looked good anyway, looked comfortable.  He lived on a small farm in the country where he grew organic foods, and other, less-legal things.  He took a great interest in the details of a marijuana hoist the police described.  “Keep it small,” he confided in her during break.  “That’s the key, I think.  Just enough for myself.  And a friend or two, of course.”  He was amazed when Elizabeth told him she’d made it through college without ever trying marijuana.  “That’s a crime,” he said.  “An absolute crime.”  He said she must come out to the farm sometime to give it a try. 

When the sky was beginning to turn light and she was finally drifting off to sleep Elizabeth dreamed a huge structure made of hammered metal, painted in bright colors of green and pink, catching the light and glittering, being wheeled somewhere by laughing men.  In her half-sleep she knew it was called the God of Daylight and Sunshine.

         In the real sunshine, the next morning, she walked by herself on the path to the main building.  Robert was still shaving.  She heard movement and chattering above her, and looked up to see monkeys—two, three, more—in the trees above her head, running along the branches like squirrels.  They made the branches dip and shake as if in a breeze.  A young man passed her, wearing the hotel uniform, and said hello.  When she smiled and answered he stopped and said “It’s a beautiful day.” 

         “It is.  And this is a beautiful place.”  He looked around and nodded.  His skin was a glossy dark, his uniform tan and pressed.  “You’re lucky to work here,” she added.

         “Oh no,” he said, and shook his head.  “No, this isn’t a good place to work.  Oh, it’s pretty, but the pay is just fifty rand a day.  And we have families, you know, my mother to feed, my sisters . . .”  He paused, looking around cautiously, and said, “This black and white business, you know.  It’s hard.”  He smiled, as if he knew he’d been gloomy then, and asked, “What part of the US are you from?”

         Most Africans didn’t distinguish between one part of America and another.  “From Massachusetts.  It’s in the Northeast.” 

         He nodded, thoughtful.  “My cousin went to California.  He didn’t like it there—so cold!  People were rush, rush, always.”

         She laughed, at the depiction of California as cold.  “Yes, Americans are in a hurry, it’s true.” 
         He held up a hand.  “My boss.  I need to go.  Bye, Missus.”  He walked on briskly, and in a moment a heavy white man, also wearing the hotel uniform, passed her on the trail.  His look made Elizabeth feel as if she, also, were guilty.

         The country of South Africa was a huge mystery to her, its squalid miles of tin shacks leaning together in the dust, donkeys pulling wrecked cars on flat wagons on the freeway, not far from elegant houses, Cape Dutch style, sweeping wineries, and estates behind high fences topped with electric wire.  Everything was all jumbled together in this country.  Here they were protected by sliding electronic gates from the locals, and by electrified fences from the animals, in a spacious enclosure where they could imagine they were close to nature. 

         She took a seat in the restaurant, next to the lobby, and also without walls, open to the morning.  The light was strong through the leaves, broken into zebra-like patterns.  Large green fruit clustered where branches met the trunks of trees.  Elizabeth still felt the force of her sleepless night and her strange dreams, heightening everything she saw.  She sipped the strong coffee.  Sleeplessness and disorientation made her distrust her perceptions, as if she were high.  The world seemed to shift in ways she couldn’t predict, tilting dangerously, and—apart from the malaria pills and the white wine last night—she hadn’t taken any drugs at all. 

         Through the leaves she saw a Red Sox cap, bobbing as he walked over the little bridge to the veranda, then along the passageway.  The cap nodded briskly at a passing man in hotel uniform.  Robert smiled as he caught sight of her, and gave a little wave.  She felt a strange clutch in her heart as she waved back, then looked down, arranging her napkin on her lap.  His cheerfulness and energy, along with his khaki shorts, marked him as American to her eyes.  He was crisp and defined, self-confident.  As Elizabeth formed an answering smile on her face she felt she was trying to draw lines around her own hazy outline, make herself—the shifting, unformed being that she was, her own contrary ghost—into something that had a shape, something that could smile back at her husband and lift her face upward, for his kiss.

 

           They were to spend the next few nights inside the park, in a remote camp.  The woman who checked them out at the hotel desk said she’d lived in the area her whole life.  Elizabeth asked her about groceries in the park; were they expensive?  “Oh no,” the woman said, then added, “I don’t have any idea.  I’ve never been inside the park.”  They passed the gift shop full of African crafts and put their suitcase in the car, Elizabeth all the while musing over the fact that the woman at the desk had never been inside Kruger Park.  The woman was about Elizabeth’s age and was neat, well-spoken.  She did calculations and realized that, if the woman earned what the other man earned and paid what Elizabeth and Robert did to enter the park, it would cost her almost three days’ salary to enter for a day.  The cost of their cottage for the night would be more than a month’s salary. 

           They stopped at Kruger Gate and filled out forms, then drove slowly into the park on the paved road.  Trees and brush spread out on either side, with nothing else in the distance.  Elizabeth, staring into the bush, kept imagining she saw the white flash of houses or trailers, but knew there was nothing, it was just her mind playing tricks on her, creating what she would have seen if she were at home, driving through the countryside.  Cars passed slowly, their occupants staring out the windows.  She saw the flash of movement through the trees.  A herd of impala, running.  Not far from them she caught sight of the long spotted necks of giraffes, lifting above the trees.  “Oh look,” she said, touching Robert’s arm.  “There.”  There were three of them—no, four.  They watched them pull leaves from the trees, tugging, chewing entire small branches.  She’d seen giraffes in zoos, but there was something wonderful about seeing them here in the wilderness—as if she’d discovered the animal herself. 

           They bought groceries at a camp of thatched roof huts, protected by fences, and drove on.  The camp where they had reservations was isolated, small and quiet, and had no store.  They drove for an hour down a one-lane gravel road, pulling over twice to let a car pass from the other direction.  When they were almost to the camp’s gate Rob slowed the car, and pointed off to the left.  An elephant was ripping long strips of bark from a tree, then stuffing them with his trunk into his mouth.  There was a smaller elephant, a child, then a large one—a family group, it seemed, though Elizabeth had heard that elephants in herds were females.  The large one was close, no more than twenty or thirty feet away.  He stared at their stopped car, shaking his ears in a threatening manner.  “We better go,” she said softly.  Just then the elephant made a sudden quick movement—she had no idea they could move so fast—and lunged for their car.  Rob fumbled for the gear shift, hit the gas and they drove away. 

           

*   *   *   *

 

“It stopped in plenty of time,” Elizabeth said later.  “It was just threatening us.”

          That’s what the men at the camp desk had said when they checked in; it was just threatening them.  Elizabeth and Rob sat on the tiled deck of their thatched-roof cottage, drinking wine. 

          “I think it could have killed us,” Rob said.  “It wanted to.  It had that look in its eye.”

          “Elephants always seemed like such gentle giants to me,” Elizabeth said.  “You know, circus elephants.  Dumbo.  Though I guess they do trample people sometimes.”

          “It wanted to kill us,” Rob repeated.  He seemed amazed by the idea.   Elizabeth refrained from reminding him that the animals here were of course dangerous—that’s what the fences around the camps were for.   At home all dangerous animals were in the zoo.  That’s why they were here; to see real life, up close.  Like the beautiful green praying mantis Rob pointed out to her, on the wall above their heads—something she’d seen only in photographs before.

          To an observer, Elizabeth thought—such as the cleaning woman, who stopped by just after they unpacked, asking in a soft voice to see their “bedding card,” or to people in the cottage next door, behind thick bushes—they were a close, relaxed couple, enjoying their vacation, sitting by one another watching night fall.  And they were close—close enough that they read one another’s gestures, could understand each other well enough that conversation, at times, was unnecessary.  Elizabeth kept her face smooth, with a slight smile, which she hoped would convince Rob that she was enjoying herself, she was fine.  Conversation was easier if they stayed away from difficult subjects, kept to safe terrain.  What they would do the next day, what they were seeing right now.  Vacations gave new material for discussion, allowing them to avoid messy topics, personal topics: life and death, for instance.

          She’d grown accustomed to the idea of not having children.  It almost seemed the right thing, as Rob said it did.  Yet at the funeral her sister’s little girls had pressed against their mother, wiping wet cheeks against her skirt.  Their tears loosened something in Elizabeth, made her long to hold the children, letting their tears and softness speak for her.

          Elizabeth went into the cottage to start dinner.  She pulled chicken and vegetables from the small refrigerator and began cutting the pieces for a braai, or barbeque, while Rob started a fire on the outside grill.  They had equity in a house, careers they enjoyed, and a decent and friendly marriage, which could carry them through decades, into their old age.  If only she would behave herself, if only she wouldn’t act like a child.  If only she didn’t do something to ruin it all.

          She stopped and stared out the little kitchen window.  More monkeys dipped the branches outside, chattering.  She’d gone out to Caleb’s farm with him one day they’d been released early from jury duty.  It was early autumn, the trees just turning color and shaking in the wind.  Caleb lit a joint for them—a “blunt,” he called it—and she inhaled until the harsh smoke made her cough.  Caleb showed her how to hold it.  “You sure we won’t get arrested?” she asked.  “We won’t be appearing before the grand jury?”

          He patted her back to calm her down, then leaned toward her and let his lips touch hers.  She could taste the smoke on his breath.  “You’re beautiful,” he said.  Why, she wondered, did it make her so happy to hear him say that?  As if it gave her release to do something, to fulfill her wildest heart’s desire. 

          But she hadn’t done more than that.  She’d taken one more hit from the hand-rolled cigarette, then thanked Caleb, told him she had to get home.  Even the disappointment on his face as she walked to the car filled her with delight.  He touched her hair when she left, dropping his hand when a car passed them on the road.  She didn’t know if the marijuana affected her or Caleb’s kiss, but the sky seemed fractured as she drove home, sunlight and clouds chasing each other around the blue in patterns that made a sense of their own.  She pulled to the side of the road just to watch the weird stories being told in the sky.

           

          “There,” Dumi said, shining the big light toward a tree on the left side of the bakkie, or truck.  “See the eyes?”  They were like glowing lights, reflecting back at them.  “It’s a bushbaby.”  They saw its shape then, the small furry body and long tail and huge, round eyes as it dashed out on the branch toward them, then away.  Dumi was their guide, taking them on an early morning game drive.  Elizabeth hadn’t slept well for a second night, waking several times in alarm at some unfamiliar sound, jumping out of bed not knowing where she was.  Once she sat up and started talking to Rob, asking him what he was doing.  “I’m sleeping,” he said, pulling a pillow over his head.  “Go back to sleep.”  When she fell asleep again she was awakened by the alarm, which they’d set for four fifteen, to be picked up at 4:30.  Now she stared dully at the light sweeping through the darkness as they passed by.   The air became filled with more gray light until Dumi switched off the big flashlight, which he called the “torch.” 

          He stopped the truck again, pulling over to the side.  “There,” he said, pointing at a branch above their heads.  “Do you see something there?”  They craned their necks, staring into the tree for a small shape.

          “No,” Elizabeth finally admitted. 

          “I don’t see anything,” Robert said

          “A chameleon.  On the branch there.”   She looked again, and saw nothing, until after a time she saw a leaf that was thicker than the rest, of a slightly different shape.  It was the chameleon, curled around the branch, pretending. 

          Robert had a book of South African wildlife and another of plants, both open on his lap, flipping back and forth through them.  He wanted to identify everything, name everything, like Adam.  She wondered idly why he couldn’t just look at things, and listen.  For no particular reason she remembered then what she’d been dreaming; her mother was visiting, sitting at the kitchen table.  I thought you were dead! Elizabeth exclaimed in the dream.  She was amazed and happy, so happy to see her, yet afraid.  Anxious that she would do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, and her mother would disappear.  Oh that, her mother said, and laughed.  She was trying to shrug it off, Elizabeth knew, but even as she watched her mother she began to disappear, to fade.  When she knew the cancer was terminal Elizabeth’s mother had a habit of looking at her own hands at odd moments, in the middle of a conversation, stretching out the always- painted fingertips and looking at them.  It was a strange inward gesture, a way, Elizabeth thought, of looking at herself, taking stock of herself:  these are my hands, and I am alive, but not for long.  In the dream her mother had held her hands up before her eyes, watching in horror as they faded away. 

          The sky was pink above the trees now, but just before the sun came up Dumi pulled over once more.  This time he didn’t need to say anything; they sat in silence and watched the lion cubs sit and stand in the road ahead of them.  One was lying on its stomach with paws in front, a baby sphinx.  After a moment an adult female, a lioness, walked out of the bush.  She glanced at the truck indifferently, stared for a moment in the other direction, then walked slowly past the cubs and into the trees on the other side of the road. 

 

          Caleb had begun calling Elizabeth at home, just to say hi.  Once he called her at work.  He asked her to come visit him again.  She’d like that, she said.  She told him she would come by before they left for their vacation, but she called him the day before they were to leave and left a message saying she wouldn’t be able to make it.  The thought of walking into the shadowy coolness of his house, of sitting with him in his living room, their words hanging in the air along with the smoke, filled her with fear and longing.  She was afraid.  Something in Caleb himself made her pause; something in the insistency of his calls, a wildness in his eyes.    

          She wondered if Rob had been involved with anyone else since they’d married.  He had opportunities, and he was attractive.  But she didn’t think so; it just wasn’t him.  He wasn’t shy, and he liked to talk to women at dinner parties, but philandering didn’t fit with the image he had of himself.  He looked down on men who needed to cheat on their wives.  He said people like that were letting their lives get out of control, that nothing was worth wrecking a good marriage.  Elizabeth had always agreed with him, of course, but wondered what one did when the lines that normally defined the parts of one’s life—the line between married and not-married, between awake and asleep, between life and death, between oneself and another person—stretched and blurred, becoming lost in the overall picture.

          Elizabeth could not adjust to the time change.  She felt vaguely ill during the night, but better in the daytime.  In the day she tried not to allow herself naps, in order to adjust.  In the evening she would fall asleep to wake startled by some small noise, and then be awake, padding around barefoot on the cool tile floor, looking out the windows at the impenetrable darkness.   Her dreams kept the same intensity and vividness.  She was envious of Robert’s dreams; he dreamed of problems at work, of driving the car.  She dreamed she was carried off to be sacrificed; the bones of ghosts hung in trees above her head, and faceless figures waited for her at huge doorways.  She was grateful for morning, for the light finally creeping into the cottage.  One morning before Robert awoke she walked to the fence at the edge of the lawn and looked out to see a herd of elephants on the open area beyond, pulling grass up with their trunks, rubbing against one another.  She counted twenty-four.  The scene was eerily quiet, with just the wind rustling leaves and the faint scuffing of elephantine feet.  One of the huge creatures lay down on its side in the sand, as if it were in a circus. 

          They took long drives through the park in their rented car, looking for wildlife.  They saw black rhinos, kudus, wildebeest, hyenas, baboons, and hundreds of impalas.   Hippos, submerged in green water, looked benign and humorous, but “They’re the most dangerous animal in the park,” Robert said.  They turned the air conditioning on in mid-morning and kept the windows rolled up, unused to the relentless heat.  It had been snowing when they left Boston.  Their car was small compared to the Land Rovers that passed them.  Elizabeth kept the wildlife and plant books open on her lap and dutifully looked up anything Robert had a question about, while he drove.  She peered into miles and miles of brush and forest, looking for shapes which were animal and not vegetable.  Her eyes followed the fleeing wildlife, while her thoughts followed tracks of their own, down secret paths.  They ate lunch at another camp and made it back to their cottage before the gates closed at 6:00 p.m.  

          The road to their camp was long and lonely, a narrow gravel road that at times seemed more like a path.  On their way back, in the late afternoon, they paused in a dip in the road to look at an eagle perched high above them—African Fish Eagle, the book said its name was.  As they sat in the front seat, Robert peering through binoculars, the car died—the engine sound just faded away.  When Robert started it, it died immediately again.  The eagle flapped away.  The next time Rob tried, it made a fainter sound, which died out even more quickly than before.  He let it rest, and tried again. 

          “Well,” Robert said.  “I wish my cell phone worked here.”  They looked out the windows, at the trees pressing close against the road, the rough bare places in between.  Some of the tree trunks had long pieces of bark hanging from them, and here and there a dead gray tree raised bare arms.  It had been clear all day, and now with the sun low behind the trees and the air conditioner off, it was still warm.  The camp where they were staying was nearly ten kilometers from where they were stopped.  If they were outside the park they could walk, but walking without a guide was forbidden here.  Dumi had told them of a guide who was killed by a leopard recently, an old one desperate for food.  The people with the guide had to drive the truck back to the camp.  Elizabeth didn’t ask if they took his body with them, or if the old leopard had had his meal.

          “Maybe someone will come along and give us a ride,” Elizabeth said.  It was 5:30, and the gates of all camps closed at 6:00.  Sometimes the truck came along this road on night game drives, but on some nights they went the other way out of the camp, east instead of west.  Other nights there was no game drive at all.  “Maybe,” Robert said, with as little optimism in his voice as she felt. 

          “I have to go to the bathroom,” Elizabeth said, immediately conscious of how ridiculous that sounded, with no bathroom for miles.  “I have to pee,” she amended.  She’d been holding it for the past two hours.  She opened the car door hesitantly and squatted behind a bush—though who would see?—and felt the relief of letting go, listening to the sound it made hitting the ground below her.   When she finished she stayed down, looking around for a leaf to wipe herself with.  That’s when she saw the insect-like creature sitting on the rock next to her, tail curved above its head.  It was dark brown, large and shiny, and looked like a crayfish, or a small lobster.  She reached out a finger to touch the shiny carapace, the curved tail, but something made her draw her finger back.  

          When she returned to the car Robert stepped out to do the same, aiming his urine into the bush away from the car.  She watched him standing with legs spread; men had an easier time of it.  When he sat down again he took off his hat and said, “I saw a scorpion on a rock.  Did you see it?”   

          “Was that what that was?”  She didn’t tell him she had reached out, had almost touched it.  “They’re dangerous, right?”

          “Very,” he said.  “Its sting is probably not fatal, but I’m not sure.”

He tried the car once more.  It barely made a sound this time before it gave up.   “We’re here for the night,” he said, and slouched against the car door, putting his cap back on and pulling it low on his forehead. 

 “It could be worse,” Elizabeth said.  “We have snacks—” she’d brought along a bag of fruit and crackers—“and some water, and we’ll just sleep in the car.  It will be an adventure.”   It felt strange to be the one comforting her husband. 

“You can’t sleep in a comfortable bed in the cottage.  There’s no way you can sleep here.  We’ll be up all night.” 

          Elizabeth wondered whether she could get out of the car when it was dark to urinate again, or if she would be prey, caught with her pants down.  But she said, “I’ll manage.  If I’m going to be awake I might as well be awake here as in the cottage.”  She wondered what lack of sleep really did to a person.  Was she losing her mind; were her perceptions warped?  The darkening sky above the trees seemed streaked with purple, and it felt as if it was rapidly cooling off—were those accurate perceptions?  Robert was more upset than he would normally be:  was that accurate?   Was she who she thought she was, a kind and thoughtful person married to a man she loved, or was she someone else entirely? 

          Rob pushed his hat up and looked at her.  His eyes were gray with a distinctive spot of brown in the left iris; he was her beloved, she would know him anywhere.  She leaned in to kiss him, to find his lips with her own before it was too dark to find her way.  

          After their kiss Rob said, “You haven’t been enjoying this trip.  Maybe it was a mistake.”

          “No, it wasn’t a mistake,” Elizabeth said.  “I don’t know why I can’t sleep.”  She’d never suffered from insomnia before.  “Maybe I had a curse put on me by that man I bought the mask from.”

          “I don’t think the man who sold you the mask is the problem,” Robert said.  There was silence between them, and in the growing darkness it was harder to see his face. 

She wanted to ask him what he thought the problem was, then, but was suddenly afraid.  It was hard to distinguish shapes in the bush around them now, and the night stretched in front of them, long and full of uncertainties.  She reached for his hand. “You’re my husband,” she said suddenly, and the words seemed to be something more than a statement of fact:  they were a realization, a decision.  “I want to stay married to you.”  They heard the screech of night hawks above their heads, and from somewhere in the woods on her side, low chattering sounds, as of baboons.  “It’s been a good ten years.”  The years seemed to be visible before her, sweet in their familiarity and affection, sweet and gone, faded and discolored already, like old photographs:  a Maine farmhouse, drowsy in the evening with a fire in the woodstove, snow sweeping past the windows.

          It was almost completely dark by then, the only light in the car a red blinking dashboard light that indicated, she thought, that the alarm system was still working.  She couldn’t see Robert’s face at all, could only hear his steady breathing.  She closed her eyes and felt sleep rush over her.  For a moment she saw again the flashing metal construction, the God of Daylight and Sunshine.  But this time three small bright figures climbed it, as if it were a jungle gym.  They were her lost children, living somewhere still. She could hear their voices, the far-off voices of children, calling to one another in laughter.  A hazy figure stood next to them, arms lifted; was it her mother?  Elizabeth started violently, and opened her eyes. 

Rob drew her closer, shifting his body to let her lean against him.  “It’s all right,” he murmured, his voice as comforting as a blanket.  Something made her look out the back window just then, where light still lingered in the sky. There where the road met the horizon something crossed, something long and dark. It stopped, lifted its large head to sniff the wind, then rested its haunches against the ground, waiting, waiting, for what, she was not sure. She heard a sound she thought must be the truck, starting on its night drive, but then it faded, and she realized it was only the wind.

 

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