No Enemy but Time (52 page)
“Daddy, I don't feel well. I've got to get out of here.”
I was torn. To desert my guests would be inhospitable, almost a breach of diplomatic etiquette.
However, if Monicah were genuinely ill, I owed it to her to escort her back to our suite. During the entertainment to follow, my absence would be of small consequence to these people.
As the Gombe Stream Chimps initiated a tumbling exhibition, Dirk Akuj pushed back his chair and made a tactful half bow. “At your service, Mr. Kampa. Allow me the honor.”
Alarmed, I tried to protest.
“He'll do fine, Daddy. Spiffy jacket, polished shoes, a credit to his tribe, whatever it may be.”
“Karamojong, Miss Kampa.”
“Right. A survivor. He's got to be okay, Daddy. Ta ta. We'll see you whenever you can tear yourself away.”
Arm in arm, they disappeared together into the multitiered dark. Tim Njeri and another security man would intercept them at the door and accompany them upstairs, but I still did not appreciate the turn that events had taken. Dirk Akuj was a stranger with admitted ulterior motives, and his interest in my daughter, just fifteen today, struck me as ominous, something other than the tardy fibrillations of a young man's fancy. After all, the Ugandan was not
that
much younger than I.
* * * *
ilmoran
in the bushveldt rather than security agents in the corridor of a resort hotel.
“She's feeling better, I think,” Timothy told me.
“What about Mr. Akuj from Uganda?”
Tim nodded at the door.
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“He's still with her?” I was incredulous.
“Unless he jumped from the balcony, sir. There's no place else for him to go.” Tim correctly read my disapproving look. “Miss Monicah insisted, Mr. Kampa, and today is certainly her birthday.”
“Yesterday was certainly her birthday.”
I went inside and found to my relief that Dirk Akuj was boiling water in a small ceramic kettle on my hotplate, a pair of piddling WaBenzi luxuries about which I never suffered any guilt pangs, not even in establishments prohibiting their use. He had shed his phosphorescent tuxedo jacket but was otherwise fully attired. Although that meant nothing five hours after my last sight of him, I pretended that it did.
Lying on the colorful cloak she had worn around her shoulders that evening, Monicah was snoozing in her Sambusai maiden's outfit. Her tiny breasts were exposed, and her shaven skull gleamed like an obsidian egg. A twenty-year-old photograph of President Tharaka kept watch over her from the wall above the bedstead. I put my daughter's telegrams down next to her outstretched hand and turned to face the intruder.
Dirk Akuj toasted me with a demitasse cup of tea and asked me if I would care to join him. I declined.
“Why are you still here?” An astringent medicinal scent pervaded the room, probably from his tea.
“I wanted to talk to you in a more hospitable setting than the protectorate, sir.”
I took off my coat and shoes and slumped into the chair. I hoped that my posture would convey my weariness.
Dirk Akuj said, “You never spirit-travel anymore, do you?”
“The flesh is willing, but the spirit's weak.”
“Have you ever wondered why, sir?”
“Why the spirit's weak?”
“Why you've been ‘cured’ of the dreams that set you apart from your fellows as a child.”
“Because Woody Kaprow and White Sphinx used my attunement to make me
live
those dreams, that's why. I got them out of my system, and for the past fourteen years I've been an ordinary person.”
“Ordinary celebrity, sir.”
I conceded this stickling emendation with a grimace.
“Have you ever considered that your spirit-traveling, your dreamfaring, was
predictive
?”
“Of what?”
“Of what happened to you during one long month in the late summer of 1987. Your dreams were premonitions of the time-travel experience that finally took place through the agency of White Sphinx.
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You had been seeing the future as well as the past. Do you understand?”
“It's too late for this, Mr. Akuj.”
“Has none of this ever occurred to you, sir?”
“No, none of it ever has. My spirit-traveling episodes didn't correspond to what happened to me once I'd been physically displaced into the past. So they
weren
'
t
predictive, you see.”
Dirk Akuj sipped whatever was in his cup and strolled past the wall-sized window overlooking the lake.
My annoyance did not discomfit him. His manner suggested that the satisfaction of his curiosity was more important than the satisfaction of mine. What did he want? What was he driving at? I wanted to shout these questions at him but did not like to disclose so nakedly my eagerness for answers. Monicah stirred in her sleep.
“How do you feel about what happened to you back there?” he asked, gesturing at the window with his cup. “I mean, how do you feel
today
about the strange interruption of your life?”
“I try not to think about it, Mr. Akuj.”
“Why, sir?”
“Because it's grown more and more remote with each passing year, and I'm half afraid none of it ever really happened.”
“Paradise Lost?”
I raised my eyebrows. What was that supposed to mean?
“But there's your daughter, Mr. Kampa.” Dirk Akuj nodded at the bed. “To doubt her reality would be akin to doubting the world's.”
“I'd doubt the world's first, let me assure you.”
“It's interesting you should feel so. Dr. Kaprow often used to displace himself into the past for brief stays. He kept them brief to prevent using up his ability to make the transition. But upon coming back, Mr. Kampa, he would sometimes say that he had returned to a ‘simulacrum’ of the present. His very word,
simulacrum
.”
Pensive, Dirk Akuj touched his lips to the rim of his cup, then drew them back.
“Even continuous transcordion contact did not reassure Dr. Kaprow. When he reemerged from our displacement vehicle, he feared that he had given himself into the society of ghosts and
Doppelgängers
.
Each trip, he once informed me, put him at a further remove from the real. Eventually the horrifying past of the martyrs became his prime reality, and he chose to stay there.”
This little narrative frightened me. If I lay down to sleep beside Monicah, might I awaken to find that the Sambusai Sands had disappeared into mist, that the world itself had evaporated? Where would I be then? A limbo in which the terms of my ghostliness prohibited any further contact with the people who had played a part in my life? The lateness of the hour, the champagne I had drunk, and the disorienting presence of Dirk Akuj set me trembling.
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“Do you believe yourself to be a ghost?” I asked my nemesis.
“Certainly, most certainly, Mr. Kampa, but not perhaps in the way that Dr. Kaprow meant to imply.
Each one of us is a ghost of every other, I think. Each one of us is possessed by the spirits of our ancestors, living and dead. Otherwise, how could we dream? Not to believe ourselves ghosts in this sense would be to cut ourselves adrift from our beginnings.”
It's too late for this, I thought, not understanding.
Aloud I said, “What do you want, Mr. Akuj? What is this all about?”
On the carven sideboard fronting the window he set his demitasse cup. A highlight twinkling on its handle mocked the glittering of the stars above the mountains on the western side of the Rift.
“White Sphinx has been revived, Mr. Kampa, but with a different emphasis. Now we choose to go forward instead of back.”
“No pursuable resonances,” I murmured.
“Despite what Dr. Kaprow may once have told you, it's possible, sir. The chief requirement is a chrononaut whose spirit-traveling episodes propagate along
advancing
world lines.”
Dismayed by this intelligence, I looked at my daughter.
“I've discussed this matter with Monicah, Mr. Kampa. She's eager to participate. The rewards are many.”
“WaBenzi rewards!” I exclaimed, rising and going to the bed. “I won't let her.” I sat down beside Monicah and took her hand, which was warm and poignantly soft. How could I commend her into the custody of Dirk Akuj, whose interest in her was probably carnal as well as mentorly? Monicah's eyes opened, and for a moment they were transparent, luminescent, bottomless, like the Grub's before our return.
“Spiritual rewards,” countered Dirk Akuj, hoisting himself onto the sideboard and crossing his feet at the ankles. “Not only for herself, but for all those who survive to make the future their present.”
Monicah drew up her knees and scooted away from my touch. Her face wore a startling expression.
Although her appearance had always been more human than habiline, as if my blood had overwhelmed her mother's, tonight she looked like Helen. The strange glint in her eye bewitched as well as terrified me.
“You need parental permission for this,” I told Dirk Akuj. “Monicah's still a minor, and you need my consent for her participation.”
“You'll give it to us, sir.”
“The hell I will.”
After a brief pause the Ugandan said, “I've been fasting for two weeks. A little sisal tea is the only nourishment I take during fasts, and when I fast, I hallucinate. I hallucinate the future, you understand, and earlier this evening, in Monicah's presence, I saw you agreeing to let her participate.”
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“Why would I do a crazy thing like that?” There was a quaver in my voice.
“To regain her good opinion. You've lost it, I think, for the same reason your mother, the writer, once lost yours. She tried to take advantage of your relationship for certain unworthy, short-term ends.”
“Monicah, is that what you think I've done?”
My daughter stared at me, virtually unseeing.
“She's possessed, Mr. Kampa. You woke her before she could sleep off the effects of her trance.”
“You've drugged her!”
“With her full complicity, sir. In this state she communes across the years with her mother's spirit. You never speak of her mother, Monicah says. For a while, then, I helped her
become
her mother.”
“Bring her back,” I commanded the Ugandan.
“Far better that we should go to her, Mr. Kampa. Surely you'll take this opportunity to touch the spirit of your habiline wife?”
I glared at the man. The winter I had returned from the States to Zarakal, Thomas Babington Mubia had taken me to the world of
ngoma
by way of a Wanderobo incantation. There he had formally married my spirit to that of his dead Kikembu wife, Helen Mithaga, whom he believed a twentieth-century avatar of my Pleistocene bride. Later that winter Babington had died, but as far as I was concerned, Helen and I were linked forever, legally as well as emotionally, and my former mentor's impromptu rite had formalized our bond even in the Here and Now.
“Did you truly love Helen, Mr. Kampa, or was your dalliance with her a matter of rut and propinquity?”
“Bring my daughter back and then get out of here!”
“Forgive me,” Dirk Akuj said. “Of course you truly loved Helen, and you would like to commune with her again.”
“Listen!” I barked. “Listen, you miserable—”
“But you do, sir. You do wish to commune with your long-dead wife, and I can help you do that.”
My resolve weakened and, intuitively recognizing that he had beaten me, he headed for the door: Dirk Akuj, a Karamojong physicist with ingrained animist sympathies. He invited Timothy Njeri and Daniel Eunoto into the suite, arguing that the participation of one of these two men would help me achieve a harmonious relationship with the ghost in Monicah's body. The other security agent would stand aloof from the ceremony as an observer, a control. This arrangement would free us from the worry that I was utterly in Dirk Akuj's power. However, neither Timothy nor Daniel looked eager to take part in this scheme. They awaited some word from me, but all I could do was stare bewilderedly at the girl on the bed.
Dirk Akuj crossed to his tuxedo jacket and removed from an inside pocket a pair of plastic bags containing what appeared to be leaf cuttings and roots. He opened the bags, shook their contents into the
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teakettle on the hotplate, replenished the water in the kettle from a bathroom faucet, turned on the hotplate, and decocted this potion for a good five minutes, all the while humming a tuneless melody. A pungent odor rose into the air with the steam from the kettle's spout, a smell like minty ammonia.
Timothy and Daniel flipped a coin to see who would act as observer. The coin came up heads (President Tharaka's), and Daniel retreated to the door to watch.
After stripping to his T-shirt and briefs and urging Timothy and me to do likewise, Dirk Akuj showed us how we should empty our lungs and inhale deeply of the fumes from the kettle. We followed his advice.
Then the three of us sat down in a triangle in the center of the room and began drumming our knees with our knuckles. The steam in the open kettle on the floor focused our attention, and soon the hotel was blinking in and out of existence in time with our drumming. Monicah gazed down on our ceremony as if from a great height. She seemed to blink in and out of existence on the off-beats.