Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

First published in Great Britain by Viking 1988

Copyright © Lionel Shriver 1987

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007564019

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007564026

Version: 2015-01-13

Dedication

To Jonathan Galassi, whom I owe not only for this novel, but for a life.

The envy of any housewife up to her ears in dish towels and phone bills, the women of the Lone-luk had their water carried, their children watched and wiped, their meals prepared and their plates cleaned, while they sat in judgment, sculpted and wove, led religious services, and oversaw the production of goods for trade. However, one could recognize in them, as in equivalent patriarchal oppressors, the cold boredom of domination.

GRAY KAISER,

Ladies of the Lone-luk, 1955

Il-Ororen thought they were it. Yet they did not have the celebratory abandon of a culture that saw itself as the pinnacle of creation; rather, they were a sour, even embittered lot. If these were all the people in the world, then people were not so impressive.

… I have wondered if they took Charles in as readily as they did because they were lonely.

GRAY KAISER,

Il-Ororen: Men without History, 1949

I remember, in a rare moment of simple dispassionate clarity toward the end with Ralph, she said to me, “You win and you lose; you lose and you lose; you lose.”

“Some choice,” I said.

She was a beautiful woman, and she was tired.

ERROL MCECHERN,

American Warrior: The Life of Gray Kaiser, 2032

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

chapter seventeen

chapter eighteen

chapter nineteen

chapter twenty

chapter twenty-one

chapter twenty-two

chapter twenty-three

chapter twenty-four

chapter twenty-five

chapter twenty-six

chapter twenty-seven

about the book

Praise for The Female of the Species

About the Author

Also by Lionel Shiver

About the Publisher

chapter one

Errol, I’m tired of being a character.” Gray leaned back in her chair. “When I meet people they expect, you know, Gray Kaiser.”

“You are Gray Kaiser.”

“I’m telling you it’s exhausting.”

“Only today, Gray. Today is exhausting.”

They both sat, breathing hard.

“You think I’m afraid of getting old?” asked Gray.

“Most people are.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I’ve planned on being a magnificent old lady since I was twelve. Katharine Hepburn: frank, arrogant, abusive. But I’ve been rehearsing that old lady for about fifty years, and now she bores me to death.”

“When I first saw you in front of that seminar twenty-five years ago I didn’t think, ‘What a magnificent old lady.’”

“What did you think?”

Errol McEchern stroked his short beard and studied her perched in her armchair: so tall and lean and angular, her neck long and arched, her gray-blond hair soft and fine as filaments, her narrow pointed feet held in pretty suede heels. Was it possible she’d hardly changed in twenty-five years, or could Errol no longer see her?

“That first afternoon,” said Errol, “I didn’t hear a word of your lecture. I just thought you were beautiful. Over and over again.”

Gray blushed; she didn’t usually do that. “Am I special, or do you do this for everyone’s birthday?”

“No, you’re special. You’ve always known that.”

“Yes, Errol,” said Gray, looking away. “I guess I always have.”

They paused, gently.

“What did you think of me, Gray? When we first met?”

“Not much,” she admitted. “I thought you were an intelligent, serious, handsome young man. I don’t actually remember the first time I met you.”

“Oh boy.”

“You want me to lie?”

“Yes,” said Errol. “Why not.”

Errol found himself looking around the den nostalgically. Yet he’d be here again, surely. He was at Gray’s house every day. His office was upstairs, with a desk full of important papers. And though he kept his own small apartment, he slept here most nights. Still, he seemed to be taking in the details of the room as if to mark them in his memory: the ebony masks and walking sticks and cowtail flyswitches on the walls, the totem pole in the corner, the little soapstone lion on the desk, and of course the wildebeest skeleton hung across the back of the room, leering with mortality. In fact, it was a cross between a den and a veldt. The furniture was animate: the sofa’s arms had sharp claws, its legs poised on wide paws; the heads of goats scrolled off the backs of chairs. In the paintings, leopards feasted. The carpet and upholstery were blood red. The lampshade by Gray’s head was crimson glass and gave her skin a meaty cast. “I am an animal,” Gray had said more than once. “Sometimes when I watch a herd of antelope streak over Tsavo I think I could take off with them and you’d never see me again.”

Yet there was no danger of her taking off on the plains today. They were in Boston, and Gray did not look like an animal that was going anywhere. She’d been wounded. She was sixty years old. Though in fine shape for her age, she’d been sighted and caught in a hunter’s cross hairs. He had shot her cleanly through the heart. Though she sat there still breathing and erect, Gray had never talked about being “exhausted” before, never in her life.

“I don’t think—less of you,” Errol stuttered, apropos of nothing.

“For what?”

“Ralph.”

“Why should you think less of me?”

He’d meant to reassure her. It wasn’t working. “Because it ended—so badly.” Then Errol blurted, “I’m sorry!” with a surge of feeling.

“I am, too,” she said quietly, but she didn’t understand. He was sorry for everything—for her, for what he’d put off telling her all night, even, of all people, for Ralph. Jesus, he was certainly sorry for himself.

Pale with regret, Errol paced the den, trying to delay delivering his piece of news a few minutes more. And perhaps it is possible for parts of your life to flash before your eyes even if you’re not about to die—because for a moment Errol remembered this last year of a piece, holding it in his hands like an object—a totem, a curio.

A year ago Gray had uneventfully turned fifty-nine. Errol had finally convinced her to do a follow-up documentary on Il-Ororen: Men without History. Her now classic book of 1949 had sidestepped her most interesting material: without a doubt, Lieutenant Charles Corgie. That February, then, they’d flown to the mountains of Kenya to the far-off village of Toroto, at long last to set the world straight on the infamous lieutenant. Though he’d struck the most compelling note in the story of her first anthropological expedition, until now Corgie had been peculiarly protected.

Shocked that Ol-Kai-zer was still alive, Il-Ororen were at first afraid of her. Yet no one could remember having seen her die. When she described how she’d escaped from Toroto, the natives dropped their supernatural explanations and soon decided to cooperate with Gray’s film. They recalled that in ’48 she’d taught them crop rotation; a few claimed she’d shot “only fifteen or twenty” Africans, which struck Il-Ororen as moderate, even restrained. The rest, of course, declared she’d shot “thousands,” but then the whole story of Corgie had clearly gotten out of control. Il-Ororen lied fantastically. Charles Corgie had taught them how.

The first day Errol remembered as out of the ordinary was the afternoon they were hiking from the airstrip to Toroto, since some of their equipment had been flown in late. Always eager for exercise, Gray had refused help with their cargo, so the two of them were ambitiously lugging several tripods and two packs of supplies. Errol had been in a good mood, chattering away, imagining what their new graduate assistant would be like. Arabella West, who normally would have been with them for this project, was still ill in Boston, so B.U. was sending someone else. Errol could see her now: “‘Yes, Dr. Kaiser! No, Dr. Kaiser!’ Getting up early to fix breakfast, washing out our clothes. Gray, we’ll have a sycophant again! Arabella is competent, but she passed out of the slavery phase last year. That was so disappointing, going back to making my own coffee and bunching my own socks.”

What did they talk about then? Corgie, no doubt. It was a long hike, after all. Maybe Errol asked her to tell him the story again of how she found out about Toroto. Whatever happened to Hassatti? Did she still keep up with Richardson, that old fart?

She was not responding, but Errol knew the answers to most of his questions and filled them in himself. The air was dense; Errol enjoyed working up a sweat. For the first time he could remember, they were plowing up a mountain and Errol was in front, doing better time.

“Too bad Corgie isn’t still alive,” Errol speculated. “That would be a hell of an interview. ‘Lieutenant Corgie, after all these years in Sing Sing, do you have any regrets? And, Lieutenant, how did you do it?’”

Errol turned and found Gray had stopped dead some distance behind him. Disconcerted, he hiked back down. There was an expression on her face he couldn’t place—something like … terror. Errol looked around the jungle half expecting to see a ten-foot fire ant or extraterrestrial life. He found nothing but unusually large leaves. “Are you wanting to take a break? Are you tired?”

Gray shook her head once, rigidly.

“So should we get going?”

“Y-yes,” she said slowly, her voice dry.

She could as well have said no. Errol made trailward motions; Gray remained frozen in exactly the same position as before.

“What’s the problem?”

Her eyes darted without focus. “I don’t feel right.”

Errol was beginning to get alarmed. “You feel any pain? Nausea? Maybe you should sit down.”

She did, abruptly, against a tree. Errol touched her forehead. “No.” She waved him away. “Not like that.”

“Then what is it?”

Gray opened her mouth, and shut it.

“Maybe we should get going, then. It’ll be dark soon.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I certainly don’t.”

“I can’t keep going.” She looked at Errol curiously. “That is the problem.”

“You just can’t.”

“That’s right. I have stopped.” She said this with a queer, childlike wonder. And then she sat. Nothing.

Errol was dumbfounded. He felt the same queasy fear he would have had the earth ceased to rotate around the sun, for Errol depended as much on Gray Kaiser’s stamina as on the orderly progress of planetary orbits.

“What brought this on?”

“I’m not sure. But I wish—” She seemed pained. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about Charles. Ask so many questions.”

“Don’t talk about him? We’re doing a documentary—”

“Nothing is mine.” She looked away. “Everything belongs to other people. I’m fifty-nine and I have nothing and I’m completely by myself.”

“Thanks,” said Errol, wounded. “All you have is professional carte blanche, a lot of money, an international reputation. And merely me with you on the trail. Of course you’re lonely.”

Gray picked at some moss. “I’m sorry. It’s just—I think I imagined …”

“What?”

“That he’d be here.” She seemed embarrassed.

“Who?”

“Charles.”

“Gray!”

“Oh, I knew he was dead. But I don’t enjoy studying him much. I did that plenty when he was alive.”

It was about this time that Errol seemed to remember a prop plane whining overhead, as if carrying out surveillance, spotting her: see, down below? Weakness, desire. Snapping aerial photos for a later attack: nostalgia, emptiness. The propellers chopped the air with satisfaction. Hunting must be easy from an airplane.

“And lately the whole thing,” she went on. “The interviews, the feasts … ‘The meal was delicious!’ ‘That’s a beautiful dress!’ ‘And how do you remember Il-Cor-gie?’ As if I can’t remember him perfectly well myself. ‘No, you can’t have my shirt, I only brought three.’ Sometimes.”

Gray let her head fall back on the tree trunk. “You’re disappointed in me.”

“It’s a relief to see you let up once in a while, I guess. So you’re not perfect. Lets the rest of us off the hook a little.”

“You know, I’d love to be the woman you think I am.”

“You are.”

Gray sighed and rested her forehead on her knees.

Errol relaxed, and had a seat himself. It was a pretty spot. He enjoyed being with her.

They stayed that way. Errol’s mind traveled around the world, back to Boston; he thought about Odinaye and Charles Corgie. Finally Gray’s head rose again. She said, “I’m hungry.” She stood up, pulling on her pack. Neither said anything more until they were hiking on at a good clip.

“Food,” said Errol at last, deftly, “is an impermanent inspiration.”

“Wrong. It’s as permanent as they come. Gray Kaiser, anthropologist, is still sitting by that tree. Gray Kaiser, animal, keeps grazing.”

“That really does comfort you, doesn’t it?” Errol laughed. She was amazing.

Errol hoped Gray had gotten this eccentricity out of her system, but the following afternoon she proved otherwise. They were sitting in a circle of several women, all of whom had been girls between sixteen and twenty when Corgie ruled Il-Ororen. Now they were in their fifties like Gray, though Gray had weathered the years better than this group here—their skin had slackened, their breasts drooped, their spines curved. Still, as Errol watched these women through the camera lens while Gray prodded them about Charles, their eyes began to glimmer and they would shoot each other sly, racy smiles in a way that made them seem younger as the interview went on, until Errol could see clearly the smooth undulating hips and languorous side glances that must have characterized them as teenage girls.

“It was the men who believed he was a god,” one of them claimed in that peculiar Masai dialect of theirs. “We weren’t so fooled.”

Another woman chided, with a brush of her hand, “He was your god and you know it! I remember that one afternoon, and you were dancing around, and you were singing—”

“I was always dancing and singing then—”

“Oh, especially after!”

“Now, why did you suspect him, though?” Gray pressed.

“Well.” The first woman looked down, then back and forth at the others. “There were ways in which he was—very much the man.” She smiled. “A big man.”

The whole group broke down laughing, slapping the ground with the flats of their hands. “Very, very big!” said another. It took minutes for them to get over this good joke.

“Yes,” said one woman. “But if that makes him the man and not the god, then you give me the man!”

The interview was going splendidly now, yet when Errol looked over at Gray she was scowling.

“No, no,” another chimed in. “Now I have said years and years Il-Cor-gie was not ordinary. He was a god? I don’t know, but not like these other lazy good-for-nothings who lie around and drink honey wine all day and at night can’t even—”

“That’s right, that’s the truth,” they agreed.

“I’m telling you,” she went on, “that the next morning you did feel different. You could jump higher and run for many hills and you no longer needed food.”

“Yes! I felt that way, too! And it was a proven fact he made you taller.”

“What do you mean it was a proven fact?” asked Gray.

Errol looked over at her so abruptly that he bumped the camera and ruined the shot.

“Well, look at Ol-Kai-zer,” said one of the women, smiling. “She is very, very tall, is she not?”

They all started to laugh again, but cut themselves short when Gray stood abruptly and left the circle. Errol followed her with the camera as she stalked off to a nearby woodpile. The whole group stared in silence as Ol-Kai-zer bore down on a log with long, full blows of an ax until the wood was reduced to kindling. Panting, staring down at the splinters at her feet, Gray let the ax drop from her hand. Her shoulders heaved up and down, and her face was filled with concentrated panic. Her cheeks shone red and glistened with sweat. She would not look at Errol or at the women, but at last looked up at the sky, her neck stretched tight. Then she walked away. This was Gray Kaiser in the middle of an interview and she just—walked away.

“Did we offend Ol-Kai-zer?” asked a woman.

“No, no,” said Errol distractedly, still filming Gray’s departure. “It’s not you …” He turned back to them and asked sincerely, “Don’t people ever do things that you absolutely don’t understand?”

The women nodded vigorously. “Ol-Kai-zer,” said one, “was always like that. Back in the time of Il-Cor-gie—we never understood her for the smallest time. Then—yes, she was always doing this kind of thing, taking the big angry strides away.”

“I did not like her much then,” confided one woman in a small voice. Her name was Elya; this was the first time she’d spoken.

“Why?” asked Errol.

Elya looked at the ground. She was the lightest and most delicate of the group; her gestures retained the vanity of great beauty. “Back then—it was better before she came. Il-Cor-gie became funny. It was better before her. That is all.”

“He did get very strange,” another conceded.

“But you know why Elya didn’t like her—”

Elya looked up sharply and the woman stopped.

“He did, during that time remember, have us come to him almost every night.”

“Especially Elya—”

“Shush.”

“But he was not the same,” said Elya sulkily. The passing of so many years didn’t seem to have made much difference in her disappointment.

“Yes, that is true,” said the woman. “He was hard and not as fun and you did not jump as high in the morning.”

“He was far away,” said Elya sadly.

“Not so far, and you know it. You know where he was—”

“She bewitched him!”

“It is a fact,” many murmured. “She took his big power away. That is why he ended so badly. It was all her fault.”

Errol had this on film, and wondered how Gray would feel when she got this section back from the developers. She’d already confided to Errol that it was “all her fault,” and might not enjoy being told so repeatedly as she edited this reel.

Meanwhile the hunter was stalking the trail Gray and Errol had just hiked down the day before. Perhaps he paused by the same tree where Gray had thrown down her pack, picking up flung bits of sod and finding them still fresh, to quickly walk on again, completely silent as he so often was, and dark enough to blend in with the mottled shadows of late afternoon.

After putting away the camera, Errol found Gray in the hut where they were staying.

“Why did you walk off like that?” asked Errol.

“I felt claustrophobic,” said Gray.

“How can you feel claustrophobic in the middle of a field?”

She didn’t answer him. Instead, she said after some silence, “I’d like to take a shower.” She lay flat on her back, staring at the thatch ceiling. The hut smelled of sweet rotting grass and the smoke of old fires. It was a dark, crypt-like place, with a few shafts of gray light sifting from the door and the cracks in the walls. Gray’s palms lay folded on her chest like a pharaoh in marble. Her expression was peaceful and grave, yet with the strange blankness of white stone.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Errol.

“I would like,” she said, “to have warm water all over my body. I would like,” she said, “at the very least, to hold my hands under a tap and cup them together and let the water collect until it spills over and bring it to my face and let it drip down my cheeks.” She took a breath and sighed.

But Errol had never worried about her. “Gray?”

“I feel absolutely disgusted and tired and stupid,” she said in one long breath, and with that she turned over on her side and curled into a small fetal ball, with her arms clasped around her chest, no longer looking like a pharaoh at all but more like a child who would still be wearing pajamas with sewn-in feet. In a minute Gray had gone from an ageless Egyptian effigy, wise and harrowed and lost in secrets, to a girl of three. It was an oddly characteristic transition.

Errol wandered back outside, calm and relaxed. His eyes swept across the village of Toroto, the mud and dung caking off the walls, the goats trailing between the huts, the easy African timelessness ticking by, with its annoying Western intrusions—candy wrappers on the ground, chocolate on children’s faces, gaudy floral-print blouses. In spite of these, Errol could imagine this place just after World War II, and it hadn’t changed so much. It was good to see this valley at last, with the cliffs sheering up at the far end, and good to finally meet Il-Ororen, with their now muted arrogance and wildly mythologized memories. All this Errol had pictured from Men without History, but the actual place helped him put together the whole tale; so as the sun began to set behind the cliffs and the horizon burned like the coals of a dying fire around which you would tell a very good story, Errol imagined as best he could what had happened here thirty-seven years ago.

chapter two

It was fitting that Gray finally do a documentary about Toroto, for in some ways Errol had already made this film. Errol’s great indulgence—it bordered on vice, or at least on nosiness—was a curious sort of mental home movie. His secret passion was piecing together other people’s lives. Going far beyond the ordinary gossip, Errol pitched into history that was not his own like falling off a ledge, in a dizzying entrancement with being someone else that sometimes frightened him.

Naturally, Gray Kaiser’s life was his pet project. Assembling the footage on Charles Corgie had been especially challenging, for whole reels of that material were classified. Twenty-four years is a long time, however, and with plenty of wine and late nights Errol had weaseled from Gray enough information to put together a damned good picture. In fact, for its completeness and accuracy, Kaiser and Corgie promised to be one of the highlights of his collection.

Errol could see her in 1948 at the age of twenty-two, holed up in the back rooms of the Harvard anthropology department, gluing together some godawful pot. It was late, two in the morning maybe, with a single light, orange, the must of old books tingling her nostrils, the quiet like an afghan wrapped around her shoulders—those fine shoulders, wide, peaked at the ends. The light would fill her hair, a honey blond then, buoyant and in the way.

Gray would be telling herself that Dr. Richardson was a first-rate anthropologist and she was lucky to be his assistant, but Gray Kaiser would not like having a mentor, even at twenty-two. Richardson told her what to do. He did all the fieldwork, and she was desperately sick of this back room. She loved the smell of old books as much as the next academic, but she loved the smell of wood fires more, and of cooking bananas; she certainly yearned for the wild ululation of the Masai over this suffocating library quiet.

Padding dark and silent down the well-waxed linoleum halls of that building, a tall Masai warrior came to deliver her.

“I will see Richasan.”

Gray started, and looked up to find a man in her doorway. He was wearing a gray suit which, though it fit him well, looked ridiculous. The man didn’t look ridiculous; the suit did. His hair was plaited in many strands and bound together down his back.

“Dr. Richardson won’t be in for six or seven hours.” For God’s sake, it was three in the morning. Then, an African’s sense of time was peculiar. If you made an appointment with a Kikuyu for noon, he might show up at five with no apology for being late. With a Masai you did not make appointments. He came when he felt like it.

“I wait, then.” The man came in and stood opposite Gray, balancing perfectly on one leg, with his other foot raised like a stork’s. His long face high and impassive, he stood immobile, as he had no doubt poised many times for hours in a clump of trees, waiting for a cheetah to pass in range of his spear. Six or seven hours was nothing.

“Can I help you?”

“No.”

“I am Dr. Richardson’s assistant.”

“You are his woman?”

“I am no man’s woman.”

The Masai looked down at her. “Pity.”

“Not really. I don’t need a man.”

“You are silly fool, then, to shrivel and dry soon.”

Gray couldn’t bear his towering over her any longer. “Won’t you sit down?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll stand.” When she did so the Masai glanced at her with surprise. Gray was six feet tall, and looked him in the eye now. “Anything you want to say to Dr. Richardson will have to go through me first. You want him to do something for you, right?”

The Masai’s eyes narrowed. “Yez … but I wait for Richasan.”

“What is it?” Gray stood right next to him, close enough to make him uncomfortable. “An apartment? Or you want into Harvard?”

“I do not come for myself,” he said with disgust. “For others. These, not even my people—”

“Who?”

The man turned away. “Richasan.”

Gray was beginning to get curious. She tried polite conversation. “How long have you been in the U.S.?”

“One day.”

“What are you here for, to study?”

“Yez …” he said carefully. “I learn this white people.”

“What will you study?”

His eyes glimmered. “Your weakness.”

“You’re a spy, then.”

“We want you out of my country.”

Gray nodded. “I’ve done some work for Kenyan independence myself.”

“The lady has not worked so hard, then,” said the Masai dryly. “You are still there.”

“Well, who in Kenya would listen to a woman?”

“Yez.”

“We’re not the same tribe, you know. As the English.”

“No, you are the same. This becomes clear with Corgie.”

“Who is Corgie?”

The Masai did not respond.

“How do you plan to get the whites out?”

“Masai—” He raised his chin high. “We like to put the man to sleep with steel, the woman with wood. But the gun … Kikuyu think we best fight with talk. Kikuyu talk so much, this is all Kikuyu know,” said the Masai with disdain. “But this time Kikuyu right. I begin my study already. This white man smart with his gun, not so smart in his head.”

“Don’t underestimate your opponent,” said Gray pointedly.

“We get most whites out with talk. Talk take time. One will not wait. I come to Richasan.”

“Whom do you want to get rid of?”

The Masai folded his arms.

Gray released a tolerant sigh. She went back to her chair, settling in for the duration. “Where did you learn English?”

“Richasan. He come to my country. I save his life,” said the warrior grandly.

“How?” Gray hadn’t heard this story.

“Richasan make this picture. My people want to kill him with steel. They think this camera, it take the soul away. Ridiculous. I have worked this camera. Ridiculous to think a man could take your soul.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Gray quietly, with a slight smile. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

The Masai looked down at her with new interest, though he didn’t press her to explain. “So I stop the killing of Richasan. I help with his work. He teach me English. My English excellent.”

Gray shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“My English vedy, vedy excellent,” he reasserted with feeling.

“Your English is very excellent.”

“Yez.”

“No, I mean you left out the verb. You said it wrong.”

The Masai answered angrily in his own language.

“You’re quite right,” said Gray. “To outstrip a foreigner in one’s home tongue is weak and easy. But you were being arrogant, and I don’t think I deserved that kind of language.”

The Masai stared at her and said nothing, as if doubting his ears. Gray had responded in Masai—correct, intelligible, and beautifully spoken. As he was silent, she went on, “If you were more comfortable in your own language, you should have said so.”

The Masai stared, and she was concerned she’d angered him—Masai were easily offended. Still, she went on, enjoying the language she so rarely got to use, its lilting, playful, vowelridden sound: “And I don’t think I bear the least resemblance to a hyena, in heat or not.” Hyena, “ol-ngyine,” she took care to pronounce just as he had.

The Masai began to laugh. He extended his hand over the table and clasped hers. “Good, Msabu.” His grip was strong and dry. “Vedy, vedy good, Msabu. Hassatti. Pleasure, big pleasure.” Hassatti took a seat opposite Gray. “How you learn Masai?”

“Richasan.”

“Msabu must like my people,” he said with satisfaction.

“You’re a powerful and magnificent tribe. Straight. Angry. You bow to no one. I’ve studied and admired you a great deal.”

“So why you treat Hassatti from so high? Change his English?”

“What I admire I also embrace. I also bow to no one, even Masai.”

“Ah.” Hassatti nodded. “Now tell Hassatti. In America United States, this woman is different thing? Yez?”

“I’m different. Yes.”

Hassatti’s brow rumpled. “Richasan, he do not warn me of this … Why Msabu has no husband? Your father ask too many cows?”

“I strike my own bargains.”

Hassatti reached out and touched Gray’s fine honey hair, pulling a strand toward him across the table and running it between his fingers with a smile. “Eight, ten. Beautiful fine strong cows. Barely bled.”

“I’m very flattered, but why don’t you just tell me why you’re here?”

“It is man’s business.”

“I’ll strain my brain.”

“You want twelve?” asked Hassatti, incensed. “Twelve cuts Hassatti’s herd in half—”

Gray held up her hand. “I don’t judge by wealth but by what you consider a man’s business.”

That seemed to make sense to Hassatti. “I come in kindness,” he said loftily. “These are not my people.”

“That’s admirable.”

So encouraged, Hassatti stood and strode about the small room. Gray watched him with pleasure. There was nothing like the unabashed self-glorification of a Masai warrior, even in a gray suit. Hassatti switched completely to Masai, and told his story with style and drama, as he might have to a gathering in his own kraal. Gray could imagine the fire flashing up shadows against the mud-and-dung walls, the long faces row on row, huddled in their hides, baobabs creaking in the wind.

“When the sea washes forward over stones and withdraws again,” he began, “sometimes cupfuls are caught between the rocks and the water remains. So the Masai washed long ago over the peaks of Kilimanjaro into the highest hills, the deepest creases. A small party got separated from their tribe and caught in a pocket, with the hills reaching steeply on all sides. Tired and lost and with no cattle, they erected their kraals and remained cut off like a puddle.

“As a puddle will grow scummy, dead, and dark with no stream to feed it, so did this people stagnate and grow stupid. Their minds blackened and clouded, and they no longer remembered their brother Masai. Caught in the crevices of Kilimanjaro, these warriors had sons who dismissed the talk of other tribes as superstition. They called themselves Il-Ororen, The People, as if there were no others. With no cows to tend, they scraped the soil like savages; the clay from the roots and insects on which they fed filled their heads, and their thoughts stuck together like feet against earth in the monsoons.

“Meanwhile, the Masai had forgotten about the Puddle, leaving this obscure tribe for dead. My people had greater troubles: a scourge of pale and crafty visitors infested the highlands. As we discussed, Msabu, they still do. Forgive, Msabu, but white like grubs, haired like beasts, they played many tricks, trying to trade silly games for the fine heifers of the Masai. These grubs tried to herd and fence my people as we do our cows, making rules against the raids on the Kikuyu with which a man becomes a warrior. The white people liked to show off their games like magic, but the wise of the Masai were not fooled. Hassatti has learned,” he said archly, “to work the dryer of hair. Hassatti has flown in the airplane.

“Yet the Puddle was lucky for a long time. Your people, Msabu, did not discover them. The trees and hills obscured their muddy kraals. Arrogant and dull, Il-Ororen continued to think they were the only humans in the world. Imagine their surprise, then, Msabu, when one of your own warriors landed his small airplane in the thick of this crevice and emerged from its cockpit with his hat and his clothing, with all its zippers and pockets, and his face blanched like the sky before snow—”

“Hassatti, when was this? What year?”

Hassatti looked annoyed. To place the story within a particular time was somehow to make it tawdrier and more ordinary. “Nineteen hundred and forty-three, perhaps,” said Hassatti, “though the boy from whom this story was taken is an idiot of the Puddle and cannot be trusted. Who knows if he can count seasons.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Gray. “Go on.”

“Well, the wise Masai of the highlands always knew what your people were—clever, but often weak and fat; with no feeling for cows, but good with metal. Granted your women store their breasts in cups and your men grow fur, but you copulate and excrete; you bleed and die, though—excuse, Msabu—not often enough for Hassatti’s tastes. All this my people could see. Yet Il-Ororen of the Puddle had grown superstitious and easily awed. With the constant looming of the cliffs on all sides, shadows played over their heads and made them fearful. When the white warrior stepped into their bush they quivered. They imagined he was a ghost or a god. They bowed down and cast away their spears, or ran into the forest. They had eaten clay for too long and their smiths made dull arrows, their women made pots with holes; their minds would hold no more cleverness than their pots would hold water. They had forgotten how to raid and be warriors, since there was no one from whom to steal cattle, and their boys were no longer circumcised.”

“So what happened?”

“I will give Il-Ororen this much: the gun is a startling thing, and even the sharp arrows are not much good against it, and the man Corgie made this clear with great swiftness.”

“How many people did he shoot?”

“We do not know. Yet this Corgie is of interest, Msabu, for in my studies the white man does plenty of foolish things, and Hassatti is amazed that the Corgie could fly into the crevice and set up a kingdom as a god and not soon disappoint his disciples, even if they were only Puddle people.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Gray, beginning to get excited, for if Hassatti was telling the truth—that there was a tribe out there that had never been in contact with Western civilization before—then he was talking about an anthropological gold mine. The discovery of the peoples of New Guinea in the twenties had made several careers, and that was supposed to be the last frontier … Gray was on the edge of her chair. “This man Corgie stayed? Didn’t go back and tell anyone?”

“No, he still reigns there. He shoots those who disobey. Hassatti has no respect for such a tribe, superstitious and easily trapped, but they were once Masai and now they are servants to this ungentle visitor, so Hassatti has come to his old friend Richasan so that the Corgie may be flushed out of the crevice and brought to justice.”

“How did you hear about Corgie?”

“There was a boy of the Puddle who had two brothers. They had been playing on a sacred square of dirt and made the Corgie angry. I know this seems ridiculous to you and me, but this boy spoke of some area of their compound that was worshipped and made perfectly flat, marked with mysterious lines he believed to be about the stars. His brothers disrupted the surface of this square and were killed; the boy, too, had been party to the gouging of the sacred flatness, and fled the village, climbed the cliffs, forded rivers, and finally wandered into my own kraal. It took him much time to talk at all, for he was frightened of the Masai, as he was of this Corgie—he supposed the Puddle to be all the world’s people. I did not blame him, either, for fearing the Masai. We are a great and strong people raised on meat and blood, and he was weak and scratched dirt and ate ants. He huddled in the corner of my hut for some days and would not speak, and no one of us could say where he was from. He was stunted, and had none of the earrings, markings, or clothing of my people. Though old enough, he was not circumcised. He would not eat the meat or milk we put before him, but when our backs were turned he would tear the insects from the ground and the roots from the trees.

“We thought he was a savage, but when he spoke at last he did not speak Swahili or Kikuyu, but a garbled tongue with words we recognized. With these and pictures, we pieced together his story. We might not have believed it but for the occasional rumor we Masai ourselves sometimes heard of a warrior who got lost in the far bush and returned telling tales of a gnomish clan in the wrinkles of the mountains who offered him no meat and no milk and no wife to share, but shut him out of their compound. And when this boy first saw white people in our midst, he screeched like a flamingo and hid in my hut. To this day I do not believe I have convinced him that your people are not gods. Forgive, Msabu, but the fallibility of your people seems so self-evident to me that I have to conclude the boy is a complete dwarf in the head.”

“Why have you come to Richardson? Why didn’t you go after Corgie yourselves?”

“Would that we could, Msabu. It pains Hassatti, but for the Masai to take action against a white man is dangerous. It is best for a tribe to discipline its own.”

Gray nodded. Richardson would be salivating if he were here. He’d be on the phone already, chartering a plane to Nairobi.

“Hassatti …” said Gray slowly, “you know how it is customary for boys to go out on the plains and slaughter a lion that’s been killing Masai cattle, and when he returns with the tail and paws he’s considered a man?”

“Yez.”

“Any man—or woman, Bwana—wants to pass such a test, Masai or not. I have yet to pass my test. I want to, desperately. Dr. Richardson has passed many. He is ol-moruo, an old man, now. Let me have Corgie, as you would send a young warrior to kill a beast when the elder has killed several.”

Hassatti looked at her hard. “You? Go after Corgie?”

Gray’s face flushed and her heart beat. “I am very tall,” she said simply, “and very strong and very brilliant.”

Errol could see it, hear it; he liked to play this moment over in his mind: I am very tall and very strong and very brilliant. Her ears scarlet, her eyes that piercing blue-gray.

Hassatti kept looking at her. “Perhaps—Richasan should decide.”

“Dr. Richardson wouldn’t trust me, and he never will. He will never believe I’m that grown up, just as your father will never believe you’re a man.”

“Ah.” Hassatti nodded and smiled. Gray was only twenty-two, but she already understood how much psychology crossed cultures. Fathers condescended the world over.

“Richardson may never let me hunt my lion,” said Gray. “Will you?”

Hassatti shook his head with incredulity, reached over, and touched her cheek. “Ol-changito,” he said. “’L-oo-lubo.”

He had called her a wild animal; an impala, though translated literally “’l-oo-lubo” means “that which is not satisfied.”

Gray replied, “Ol-murani.”

Hassatti shook his head. “E-ngoroyoni.”

“Ol-murani o-gol,” Gray reasserted.

Hassatti shook his head again and smiled. “E-ngoroyoni na-nana.”

There was a conflict of interpretations here. Gray claimed to be a warrior, as Errol knew she saw herself. “Ol-murani” was an old joke with her, though they both knew it was no joke, not really. Yet Hassatti had called her something else, and wouldn’t take it back.

“You have,” said Hassatti, “a great deal to learn, ’l-oo-lubo. And as long as Msabu claims she is ol-murani o-gol and not e-ngoroyoni na-nana, she will not understand what even such a clever antelope must master.”

“And what is that?”

“To pour is to fill, Msabu. Ol-changito, to pour is to fill.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Gray.

“No, you will not,” he assured her. “This is to be understood, not remembered, fleet one. The words have already flown from your head like birds of different flocks to separate trees.

“However,” said Hassatti. “Since ’l-oo-lubo is such a costly creature, and she will not accept the twelve cows, perhaps Msabu will accept from Hassatti: one lion.”

Gray smiled. “And you won’t tell Richardson where I’ve gone?”

“No more,” he said, “than I would show him the food in my mouth.” Hassatti then wrote the name of his tribe and where it was currently located; he drew her a map and gave her the name of his family. “Now you will bring me the paws and tail of Corgie when you return?”

“You mean I should deliver the witch’s slippers?”

“The Corgie wears slippers—?”

“Never mind. I’ll bring you his gun, how’s that?”

“Most of all for Hassatti ’l-oo-lubo must go out and become wise. Then come back and we will talk of becoming Hassatti’s wife.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be that wise,” said Gray.

“Neither do I,” said Hassatti. “I tell you, Msabu, it will take you a long time, longer than most e-ngoroyoni. Know from Hassatti that this will cost you. It is like when a boy waits too long and becomes all grown before he is circumcised. There is much pain, and slow healing.”

It was five in the morning. Hassatti said he would wait for his friend Richardson; Gray would find an airplane. They spoke in Masai.

“Well, I am about to go,” said Gray.

“Aiya naa, sere! Goodbye. Pray to God, accost only the things which are safe, and meet no one but blind people.”

“Lie down,” said Gray, “with honey wine and milk.”

“So be it.”

Hassatti followed her out the door to watch that long, sweeping stride of hers, listening to the clean click of her heels against the linoleum like the clop of small hooves. Gray never seemed to be walking fast, but she covered ground quickly, like a languorous, leggy animal across the plain. Strange she was not Masai. She had the bones of his own people. Hassatti could see her ranging into the bush, standing spear-straight to meet this ghostlike white man and his many guns. Though he had just arrived in this new country and had much to study, Hassatti almost went after her down the hall, for this was a scene he would have given much to see.

Gray returned that morning to her apartment, having arranged her trip to Nairobi for the following day. She sat at her desk and composed three notes. First, to Richardson, she wrote: “On good advice I am off to become wise.—Gray Kaiser.”

Second, she wrote the man she was dating. Most certainly he wanted to marry her, too. “Dear Dan,” she jotted. “I’ve been called out of town. May be gone for a long time. Don’t hold your breath. —G.”

So you put a stamp on it, Gray, what was it, three cents then? That’s how much it cost you. What did it cost him, though? You didn’t even know. Set on the corner of your desk, it was one more of those easy dismissals of a man who adored you. Ever since she was fifteen, men had been proposing to her, and she’d learned early to whisk them away like so many flies. How many times had Errol himself watched her discard prostrate admirers? He’d enjoyed watching, yet it pained him a little. Errol truly believed she didn’t understand how they felt, and for an anthropologist that was a failing.

The third letter she sent to her father, and it was the one note of consideration she struck all morning. Gray enclosed a copy of Hassatti’s map, just in case she didn’t return. Perhaps Gray feared as Errol did each time they returned to Kenya that ol-changito, let loose on those hard-packed plains, would lope across the white horizon to graze under acacia trees, to bolt between watering holes, to sniff the hard brilliant air and so give up on English and coffee and little efficient notes in the mail altogether.

More likely she knew the situation she was walking into was dangerous. Even Gray now admitted that going on this expedition by herself had been pigheaded. But ol-murani was planning on shouldering her pack and her spear and her wooden club and launching off into the sunset to find her lion … Gray had seen too many Westerns, and you knew she identified, not with the simpering prairie wives, but with the sharpshooters.

Gray took out her tent and began to reroll it to fit into its insanely small bag. So it was dangerous. So he had guns. Gray paused at the thought for one tiny, intelligent moment. She took a breath and kept on going. Fine. Here was a woman who had spent the better part of World War II thinking. Enough was enough. She was tired of having men tell stories about dragging their best friends for ten miles on their backs under fire, all the while Gray feeling abstracted and left out. It was time to begin a life in which actions could have consequences.

Besides. Gray shot a look up at the mirror that hung on her door and caught her own face looking keenly back at her. You didn’t look at a face like that without staring for a second, even if it was yours. Not bad hair. Kind of strange the way that collarbone stood out, but interesting, too … No, he wouldn’t shoot her. Not right away, she was sure. Gray wrapped the straps around the tent summarily; it fit in the bag.

Gray did own a handgun, and considered taking it. The gun had been a gift from an earlier suitor, the one he’d captured in the war. (It chilled Errol how often Gray was given weapons as presents, all over the world. As if she weren’t destructive enough already.) Yet finally Gray decided to leave the gun behind. To prepare for a military encounter was to create one. As many movies as she might have seen, Gray knew she would not succeed in her mission by hiding behind a boulder and picking off the troops. That hair and collarbone would surely prove more powerful weapons than her German Luger.

Throwing the rest of her gear together through the day, Gray thought about the Great White Corgie. She already had a strong sense of the man. He was arrogant. Ruthless. Racist. Brave, she conceded. But cruel and condescending.

And for some reason she decided he was handsome.

chapter three

Hassatti’s mother also called Gray ’l-oo-lubo, taking her into the family like a stray from the plains—isolated from the herd, difficult, but a fine specimen, and tamable.

The boy from the Land of Corgie, Osinga, was as terrified of Gray as Hassatti had predicted, but bent on his brothers’ revenge; after repeated reassurances, Osinga agreed to guide her to Toroto. Hiking out, however, he insisted on walking behind her, which made it awkward for Gray to follow him.

Errol could easily imagine Gray on this trip. Many was the time he himself had hiked behind her while a voice screamed in his head, “Go ahead, Gray, say, ‘I am tired.’ Say, ‘My muscles are killing me, Errol.’” But Gray would keep going silently in front of him, until finally Errol would growl in irascible defeat about needing a break, and Gray would answer smoothly, never out of breath, “Oh, would you like to stop, Errol? Of course. Maybe I’ll do a few push-ups while you’re resting …”

She was too goddamned much.

Toward dusk, Osinga speared mongooses and brought them to Gray like sacramental offerings. She skinned and gutted them quickly and without queasiness, for Gray enjoyed butchery. Errol had watched her take animals apart before. She liked to study the muscles glistening underneath the skin of a fresh kill, and move the joints in their sockets to see how they worked. She never called small prey “cute,” and when the glazed eyes of a mongoose in her hands rolled up, her face never softened.

Nights Gray slept fitfully, dreaming of Corgie. The dreams flipped from terror to pleasure and back again. Corgie would reach for her in her sleep, and she wouldn’t know if he meant to caress or strangle her until the moment his fingers wrapped around her neck.

The bush got thicker and more hazardous as they advanced. Through thorn trees Osinga stared at Gray’s hands, surprised that they bled. Yet she didn’t cry out or complain when the thorns stuck far into her flesh, so he assumed she felt no pain. All her life people had made this mistake with Gray.

When she stepped on a trail of fire ants and they swept up her legs, Osinga stood back and watched as she rapidly picked the insects off. At last she stamped angrily and shouted for him to help her, and he was surprised that these small animals could hurt such a thing. She seemed impregnable; she seemed that way to everyone.

There came a moment when Osinga looked up at a particular mountain and went wild-eyed. He wouldn’t go any farther; he’d only point. Gray walked the last length alone.

Once she’d climbed to the top ridge, Gray looked down into a deep valley with cliffs shooting steeply up on all sides and waterfalls sweeping down in white rushes. Finding only trees below, she worried whether this was the right place. Yet as she inched down the steep cliff toward the valley, grabbing scraggly trees and sometimes crawling on all fours, Gray could gradually discern one odd structure jutting from the foliage below, a strange, towerlike thing in blond wood. When she was nearly down, manyatta after manyatta also appeared among the trees. Aside from these traditionally constructed mud-and-dung compounds, Gray could now see three other blond-wooded buildings, large and angular and queer even by Western standards.

The rest of her way to the village Gray walked slowly, with her head high, nose to the wind. Gone was the smell of curling pages. Smoke drifted from the huts, and colors flushed beside her. Gray Kaiser was alive and in Africa and something was happening at last. When she glided past the mud-packed walls, children fled before her; men and women swept into their compounds and posts cracked against the gates inside.

As Gray drew into view of the blond tower, natives stopped carrying wood, froze mid-circle as they lashed joints on the tower with vine, left off mid-sentence as they called in their gnarled Masai. In the stillness, one figure kept jabbing angrily from the ground at a man on the third story. He was the last to turn to her, following the line of the native’s gaze as he might have tracked a fuse to dynamite.

“What doesn’t belong in this picture?”

“I don’t,” said Gray. “You don’t, either.”

“You don’t feel a little the lost sheep?” he asked. “Astray.”

It was a big comedown from antelope to sheep. “On the contrary,” said Gray, “I’ve found my way quite nicely. I have arrived.”

“I was unaware we’d become a tourist attraction.”

“Oh yes,” said Gray. “I’m here to help you set up a hot-dog concession. I thought you’d want to get in on the ground floor.”

The man smiled a little, perhaps in spite of himself. Gray took the moment to assess him more closely. Errol had seen several brownish photographs of Charles Corgie. He always wore a wide hat with a sloppy brim. His coloring was dark, his bearing sultry. His eyes flickered as if long ago someone had done something terrible to him for which he had planned a perfect revenge; when it came due he would laugh without sympathy or regret. In a few of these snapshots he was smiling, like now, though always with both humor and disdain, as if the two of you could have a high old time if he would only let you in on the joke. Of course, he was not about to.

Casually, Corgie pointed his rifle at Gray. Through their interchange he played with the gun distractedly, as people will toy with an object on a coffee table in a conversation that is sometimes awkward.

Gray nodded at his tattered khaki. “So you deserted.”

“I got lost.”

“And you still haven’t found your way home? You must not have tried very hard.”

“I tried clicking my heels together three times,” he said congenially. “It didn’t work.” Corgie turned and said something in Il-Ororen to one of the natives. The man shrank back and shook his head. Corgie repeated himself in a steelier tone; it was a voice that made all present, even Gray, take a breath. The native approached Gray and frisked her sides with a gingerly touch. “Raise your hands over your head, would you?”

Gray did not. “I’m unarmed.”

“If that’s true, then you’re very foolish. But it’s not necessarily true. White people aren’t to be trusted.”

“I’ve found that people’s generalizations are largely illuminating about themselves.”

“So what kind of generalizations do you make?”

“I’m more inclined to see people as judicious and reasonable. Unless presented with evidence to the contrary.” She raised her eyebrows at Corgie. “Which I sometimes am.”

“Some woman who can see the human race as judicious and reasonable in light of World War II.”

“What concerns me about World War II is that barbarity on such a scale seems to make smaller, everyday barbarity petty and unimportant. Actually, it’s just as important. It’s the same thing.”

“You wouldn’t be making any accusations, would you? Being our guest?”

“Oh no,” said Gray mildly. “We’re just being philosophical, aren’t we, Mr. Corgie?”

“Lieutenant. But I’m sure I would have remembered meeting such a lovely woman. I could swear we haven’t been introduced.”

“Funny. I feel as if I know you incredibly well.”

“Pretty and telepathic, too! Do you have any other special powers? They could come in useful here.”

“Certainly. I can receive disembodied transmissions, produce mirages, steal voices. All that old stuff. I’m sure you’ve covered it. But I did bring one thing you could probably use.”

“Decent tobacco.”

“Moral sensibility.”

“You remind me of aunts at Christmas who gave me socks.”

Gray nodded at his threadbare clothing. “It looks as if you could use those, too.”

Suddenly Corgie said with a smile, “Osinga!”

“Lieutenant, you of all people should have enough respect for magic not to spoil the trick.”

“I respect tricks on other people. My tricks.”

“Well, your tricks made quite an impression on the boy. He thinks quite a lot of you.”

“I bet he does. I made a bigger impression on his brothers.”

“About an inch wide and several inches deep. A cheap way to impress people.”

“It works.”

“It’s not very elegant.”

“You have far too many opinions.”

Gray stopped and looked at him. “Yes.” That’s all she said. It was an awkward moment. It is always awkward when people have nothing else to add or refute; when they agree.

“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Corgie abruptly.

“I’m an anthropologist. I came to study these people.”

“By yourself?”

Gray looked at the mouth of Corgie’s gun. It would be wise to create troops in the rear. “Yes,” said Gray defiantly.

“And who knows you’re here?”

“A few Masai.”

Corgie smiled. “You didn’t have to admit that. Though even alone you do present something of a problem.”

“How?”

“They think I’m the Ghost of Christmas Past or something. Jesus. Gary Cooper. One of a kind, anyway. Like Zeus. Now we are two.”

“Even godheads come in two sexes. You’re not up on your mythology.”

“But of course Little Miss Anthropologist is. It is Miss?”

It would be wise to be Mrs. Anthropologist. “Yes, Miss,” said Gray.

They glared in silence.

“Well, what are you going to do with me?” asked Gray.

Corgie stroked the stubble on his chin. “Charlie has to think about it.”

“Charlie had better,” said Gray. “If you shoot me they might figure out that thing would work on you. Rather blows the immortality business all to pieces.”

Corgie’s eyes sharpened.

“And if you keep me prisoner,” she went on reasonably, “they might decide you couldn’t walk through walls yourself. You see,” she explained cheerfully, “I could be of some use to you. In anthropology I’ve learned a few things, Lieutenant. For instance, that human savvy runs across cultures. If my hallowed white flesh will bleed, won’t yours?”

Corgie looked at her steadily. “You get yourself into a fix, you think you can just weasel your way out of it, don’t you?”

“Charles. Wouldn’t you do the same thing?”

“I did. Already.”

“By deserting your brigade?”

Corgie worked his jaw back and forth. “Miss—?”

“Kaiser.”

“Miss Kaiser. I left one war and walked right into another. In this one I’m president to private, the whole shebang. I’ve maintained my borders for five years now. I think that makes me quite the little soldier, with no R&R. ‘On the seventh day he rested’ is crap. Gods don’t get a day off, ever.”

“It must be exhausting, creating animals, deciding on the weather. Doling out floods and locusts—”

“It is exhausting. You’ll see.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be a deity. Maybe I’m happier as an anthropologist.”

“You’ll be a god, all right. I may not be able to use this rifle on you, but I gave earlier exhibitions. My parishioners remember them. If they get the idea that Charlie has been, ah, misrepresenting his authority, then Charlie and even his cute little girlfriend might not stay too healthy. Are you getting the picture?”

Gray nodded. “Mutual ransom.”

Corgie toured her around his buildings, explaining that he’d been an architect before the war. Each was blond, precise, and remarkable. In his cabin he showed her their scale models made from chips of wood and strips of bark. A child would have loved them, with the bits of furniture and rope swings and knitted hammocks. Dark figures in black clay strode across the plans, though in each scene there was one figure of a siltier soil, a paler concoction; it stood taller and straighter than the rest, and wore a hat.

In the first of these models, of this cabin, the figure in white mud was isolated from the black ones, but there were tiny manyattas on either side with whole families having meals and couples trysting in corners. In the second, though—of Corgie’s gymnasium—there were fewer natives, and some of these were smashed or dismembered. There were no families or couples. The blacks still standing walked starkly and singly across the ground like Giacometti bronzes. In the third model, of Corgie’s “cathedral,” there were no more dark figures at all, only the white one; his clay was of a dimmer cast and had no head and face, only a hat. The architecture in this model was more beautiful and refined than ever, but the little white man in the middle of it looked squat; his limbs had shortened, his pose caved in. In the fourth and final model, of the tower, there were no figures at all, not even a white one. There was only a building. The progression of the projects themselves had gone from the lyrical or even quaint—a quality this cabin retained, with its small details and attention to comfort—to harsher angles and harder edges, until this last project was jagged to the point of cruelty and inventive to the point of desperation.

Returning to the unfortunate black clay splayed in the dirt of the gymnasium, Gray asked, “Do you consider yourself at all—disturbed?”

“No,” said Corgie, not seeming to take offense. “Mostly bored. That was a bad time,” he admitted, gesturing to the gym. “They didn’t understand what I was doing. The equipment. The courts. Sports aren’t big here. I think they found it intriguing in a useless, mystical sort of way, but the crops were bad that year, which was hard on the old religion. I kept telling them they didn’t get rain because they weren’t cooperating.”

“You sound as if you believe that yourself.”

“Maybe I do.” Corgie shot her a quick, mysterious smile. “Anyway, I’d come back here at night after haggling with shoddy labor all day, and I’d smash one of those little clay men with my thumb: squash. Sometimes I’d do that instead of shooting one of them. I thought it was nicer. Don’t you approve?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

Charles smiled and added wryly, “Of course, it’s just shy of voodoo. I’ve been here too long.” He looked fondly down at the scene, wiping some dust off the gymnasium roof. “I always liked miniatures, even as a kid. I liked balsa airplanes and Erector sets. I had a terrific model train, with lights inside the caboose—”

“I bet you spent whole afternoons wrecking it to pieces.”

“How did you guess? And I liked to put little signalmen on the tracks and run them over.”

“I suppose the nice thing about miniatures is that they make you feel so big.”

Charles turned to Gray and looked at her hard. “Have you always been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Running a fellow down all the time. Why don’t you give a guy a break?”

“It doesn’t seem to me that you need a break.”

“Why the hell not? Who the hell doesn’t?”

“Any man with a thousand loyal fans outside his door.”

Charles waved his hand in dismissal. “Yeah. A thousand of my closest friends.” He tapped the arm of his chair and stared at his models. “You know, I’ll tell you,” he began. “The funny thing is—” He stopped. He closed his mouth abruptly.

“What.”

Charles sat.

“What is the funny thing?”

Charles licked his lips, and went on reluctantly. “When that feeling … the way you feel around these models. The little houses. The little people. The way you look down on them. Put them places. When—”

“What?”

“When you walk outside to the regular-size place? And it’s no different. That’s what funny. When you’re around life-size shit and it all still feels like—toys.” Charles couldn’t look Gray in the eye. “Animals seem stuffed. People seem like dolls. My own house looks like the station in my train set. With spikes around it. Like Popsicle sticks.” Charles cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows, looking up at Gray with an indefinite smile, as if maybe he was pulling her leg. He laughed an unsettling little laugh. “You are here, aren’t you? Say something.”

“Something,” said Gray dully.

“An old kid’s joke. Not very helpful. You’re supposed to say something that makes me feel normal-sized. In the big village. With the actual people.”

“Isn’t that the trouble? That you’re not sure they’re actual people?”

Charles stood up. “I don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.” Charles rang a homemade bell; its clacker scrabbled in the tin. A native appeared below, by the stilts of the cabin. Charles ordered dinner—with one more look at Gray to make sure she was still there—for two.

At the end of the meal, roasted game with mangoes and banana, Charles rang his dented tin bell and the native climbed up to his doorway to take the plates away. Once the servant had climbed back down, Charles pulled the ladder up and set it against the outside wall. Charles invited Gray to his veranda, which looked out on the cliffs. He lit an oil lantern on the porch. Gray climbed into a hammock and stared up; the stars were brighter and more numerous than she’d ever seen. She felt peculiarly content. When she glanced down, Gray noticed that the sides of the porch were covered with long, sharpened wooden spikes. Charles explained, “They help me sleep nights.”

Corgie himself leaned back in a broad cane armchair, and they both sipped honey wine. Smoke rose from the manyattas on either side, and the lantern, which burned animal fat, gave off a meaty smell, like a barbecue. The hoot of night birds echoed between the cliffs. Gray relaxed into the netting of her hammock; it creaked gently when she moved. The wine was sweet and potent. The flame flickered beside Charles Corgie and lit his profile as he stared off into the black bush. He breathed deeply and held the wine in his mouth a long time before swallowing. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

“What’s your name?” he asked at last. “Your first name.”

“Gray.”

“Soft, for you.”

“It strikes most people as dour.”

“No, soft. Gentle.”

“That’s surprising?”

Charles reached over and rapped against her outstretched leg with his knuckles. “Hear that? Bong, bong, bong. That’s what it’s like when you knock against the side of a tank.” He went back to staring out into the forest. Gray stared, too. The foliage pulsed as her eyes fought to focus, to pick up any object however slight. The trees bloomed on the edges in explosions of black. There’s nothing like African darkness. It eats your eyes.

“Are you insulting me?” asked Gray.

“I’m not sure.”

Gray decided to change the subject. “I can’t believe you haven’t asked me about the war. Don’t you care what happened?”

“Kaiser—I left.”

“It’s over.”

“You don’t say. Who won?”

“I don’t know if you’ll be disappointed or not. Whose side were you on?”

Charles considered, leaning farther back in his chair and setting his boots up on the railing. “Adolf isn’t my style. I don’t like the way he moves, know what I mean? The guy’s too excitable.”

“And maybe you didn’t like like the way his uniform was tailored.”

“Actually,” said Charles, looking over at her with his black eyes gleaming quietly under the looming ridge of his brow, “the tie—with the shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck—I prefer a dictator with an open collar.”

“Clearly,” said Gray. Charles’s own shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, where the hair was thick and black like his eyes, and gleamed just as defiantly in the lantern light, with drops of honey wine.

“You did use the past tense,” Charles observed.

“Adolf isn’t that excitable anymore.”

“And Benito? Hirohito?” Gray shook her head. Charles shrugged. “Just as well. Me, I’m a Napoleon man.”

“Why’s that?”

“Those losers wouldn’t know what to do with a joint once they’d got hold of it. Bonaparte had plans. I liked his projects. But that slouch Speer built some nasty, hulking places. What a no-talent. Everything he put together looked like a goddamned morgue.”

Charles pulled out a packet and rolled himself a cigarette in a leaf, quickly and expertly into a long, tight spleef. “Tobacco ran out first week,” he explained. “But I found a weed—sweet, but with an edge to it. Wasn’t common, though, so I’ve got the flock growing some over there. Doing pretty well, too. They dry it and crush it and wrap it up in packets. I miss my tins of Prince Albert, but what can you do?” Charles lit up with the lamp, then exhaled in a long, slow whistle. “The laymen aren’t supposed to smoke any, but they do. I’ll let them get away with it, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. Catch one occasionally and make an example. See, they think this stuff gives them knowledge. Actually, it doesn’t even get you doped up.” Charles took another hit. “Besides,” he said with a smile, “it suits me if they keep looking for knowing with smoke.”

“So you have them growing weeds instead of crops they could eat.”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Let’s not talk about agriculture. I like you better as the voice of the free world than as an anthropologist. So,” said Charles, leaning back with an imperial air, “did Franklin D. string our boy Adolf from the top of the Washington Monument?”

“Roosevelt is dead. Hitler killed himself. —This is like Reader’s Digest Condensed World Wars,” said Gray with frustration.

“Go on.”

Gray decided to save the atomic bomb for later.

Then she realized she could leave it out altogether if she felt like it. She could even have told Charles that Hitler now ruled Eurasia, the United States, and South America, and then this would be the truth in Toroto. It was a curious little moment of power.

“A number of Nazis are on trial right now in Nuremberg for war crimes,” she continued, thinking it was a little late in the day for inventing a whole new ending to an awfully big story.

“On trial?”

“Why not?”

“Seems pretty feeble is all. Why not shoot the guys and be done with it?”

“Out of respect for legal process. To reinstitute order.”

“Come on. Laws are just to give you an excuse for shooting somebody when you were going to shoot them anyway.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Gray.

“Nope. I know about laws. I make them.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about?”

“Not that I know about.” He added, “Except. I don’t know about you.”

Whenever he turned the conversation to her, Gray got inexplicably nervous. They sat in silence again.

“Hitler—” she ventured.

“Hmm?”

“He killed six million Jews.”

Charles looked up. “No shit,” he said noncommittally.

“Not in battles. In factories.”

“Huh,” said Charles.

Gray watched his face. “What do you think of that project?”

“Well,” said Charles, snuffing out his cigarette on the arm of his chair. “Seems like a real—waste of time, anyway.” He shot Gray a shrug.

Gray looked back at him in stony silence until she couldn’t take it anymore and started to laugh.

“I missed the joke,” said Charles.

“You are the joke! You’ve been trying to impress me, haven’t you?”

“How’s that?”

“You think if you’re blasé about six million Jews that’s going to impress me.”

“You figure that’s what Adolf was trying to do?” he said gruffly, looking away. “Impress little Eva?”

“Seriously, Charles, you want me to admire that, don’t you? I mean, that’s twisted, even horrid, but it’s sweet, too. Quaint.” Gray kept chuckling in her hammock. Charles rose brusquely from his chair. Errol knew these moments—Gray could be nasty in a light, lovely way, and she could turn a situation on a dime. Surprise, Charles Corgie.

“I’m going to bed,” he said coldly. “So are you.” He towered over her hammock, giving her a moment of nervousness Gray for once richly deserved. She stopped laughing.

“Where?”

“In my house.”

“Maybe I’ll stay outside.”

“No, you won’t. You’re a god now, Miss Kaiser, and you’ll sleep in Olympus with the rest of us.”

Gray got up cautiously from her hammock. “I’m sorry, I—”

“On the floor,” he assured her. “Believe me, it will give me far more pleasure to have you up half the night beady-eyed with worry than to do what you will worry about.” With that he blew out the lamp perfunctorily and strode inside, throwing her a hard, leathery skin for a blanket. “Good night, dear,” said Charles, crawling inside his own soft bed stuffed with feathers and pulling the warm, woolly skin over his head.

As it happened, Gray was up half the night. While Charles Corgie’s thrashing and mumbling on the bed did keep her on edge, Gray’s real problem was far more prosaic: she did not know what gods did with honey wine once they were through with it.

When Gray told this story it was very funny. She could get tablefuls of international guests rolling on the floor. On the floor of that stilted African cabin, however, Errol imagined she had not been so amused. She couldn’t sleep. The ladder was pulled up from the ground and she didn’t know how to replace it, nor whether there were too many natives about for such a mortal safari. And the situation was not, of course, improving. She’d enjoyed the wine and had drunk her share; Gray’s abdomen gradually billowed higher, until—a magic moment in Gray Kaiser’s life—she cared nothing for power and reserve; her fantasies slipped from huge tribal celebrations in her honor and lines of obsequious good-looking men at her feet to ordinary indoor plumbing. Love, humor, and courage fell away. Money and fame, art and human history fell away. World War II and six million Jews fell away. Even, at last, remaining aloof with Lieutenant Charles Corgie fell away, and Gray found herself numbly climbing up off the floor and standing by his bedside at four in the morning.

“Charles—” she said softly. “Lieutenant—”

He only grunted and turned away. She put a hand on his shoulder. Charles sprang upright and in a single motion had a rifle pointed a few inches from Gray’s chest. His eyes were completely open and alert.

“Don’t shoot!” Corgie’s rifle had very nearly taken care of Gray’s problem abruptly.

Charles did not put down the gun. He said something in garbled Masai that Gray didn’t understand.

“Please,” she said in a small voice. “I need your help.”

Slowly he lowered the gun as he recognized her by the moonlight coming through the window. “If you were thinking you could get this gun—”

“No!”

Charles looked at her more closely. “Come here.” He reached up and touched her cheek, then inspected his fingers. “No shit. You’re crying.”

Gray looked down. Tears fell on the bed frame.

Charles put the rifle aside and pulled her over to sit beside him. Her sharp shoulders were drawn to her head; she looked narrow. Charles put his hand on her cheek, turning her head to face him. “Having nightmares about terrible Charlie Corgie, who doesn’t care about six million Jews?”

Gray shook her head and looked away again.

“You miss Mommy and Daddy?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” said Gray, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

Charles pulled the hair from her eyes strand by strand and tucked it behind her ear. “What’s the trouble?”

“It’s stupid.”

Charles waited patiently.

“All this god business,” she went on. “You didn’t tell me what to do—” She stamped her foot and looked at the ceiling. “I’m not usually shy! Charles, I need the bathroom! I have for hours!”

It must have been hard not to laugh, but according to Gray he didn’t; he barely smiled. Charles cocked his head. His eyes were as warm and soft as they were going to get in the hard cool light of the moon. “That isn’t stupid, Miss Anthropologist. You’re new to your field or you’d know better. For a god, taking a leak is a serious business. You have to be careful. Quiet.” He led Gray to a corner, where she slid down a pole to the foliage below. When she returned Charles lifted her back up. He wasn’t a massive man but could pull her whole weight with obvious ease. When she was up, Charles kept hold of her hand a moment, then with a funny annoyance let go and told her to get back to sleep. As she was settling back down on the slats this time, again with irritation, he tossed her his feather pillow before turning his back on her with a grunt and wrapping his arms fondly around the muzzle of his gun.

chapter four

I’ve decided what to do with you,” said Charles cheerfully the next morning. He was shaving, with a sheet of polished aluminum from the siding of his airplane propped up for a mirror.

“Oh?” asked Gray warily, still groggy and on the floor.

“Yes.” Charles raised his chin in the air to sweep the razor underneath. “I’ve decided to let you go.”

The blade made a sheer scraping sound that raised the hair on Gray’s arms. “I did not come here,” said Gray, “to go.”

“You shouldn’t have come here at all,” said Charles. “You made a mistake. Usually when we make mistakes, that’s it. But: you are dealing with Little Jesus. You have your own personal fairy godfather. Click your heels together and in your case it will work.”

Gray picked herself up in order to get a better view of his face. Charles did not look at her but scrutinized his chin more closely. There was a bullet hole in the siding, and his stubble distorted and rippled in the aluminum.

“Aren’t you concerned that I’ll tell?” asked Gray slowly. “About you? About Toroto?”

“Now, why would you do that? When I’ve been so gracious? And these people have someone to take care of them?”

Charles may not have been looking at Gray, but Gray was certainly looking at Charles now, very very carefully. “Because I’m an anthropologist. I’d want to come back with reinforcements.”

“So military! And I thought we were friends.”

“You’re the one who sees this village as one more battle of World War II.”

“Against them, not you, sweetheart.”

“Sweetheart is on their side.”

Charles clucked his tongue. “No racial loyalty.”

“The point is, I’d have every reason to return here with company. You’ve murdered people here. This is a British colony. You could be arrested.”

“Miss Kaiser, are you trying to convince me to shoot you?”

“I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already thought about.”

Charles said nothing. It seemed to Gray he should have finished shaving by now. His face looked smooth. Still, Charles picked at individual patches with great attention.

“What are you planning to do, turn me loose in the bush? I had a guide to get here. How would I find my way out?”

“You could have an escort partway. Why, maybe the Tooth Fairy himself would help you up the cliffs.”

“Maybe I’ll stay here.”

“Sorry. No room at the inn. Booked for the season. Manger’s filled, too. One Jesus per village. It’s checkout time.”

“When those Jews were gassed in the camps,” said Gray softly, “they were told they were going to take a shower.”

Charles turned toward her finally and looked her in the eye. He said nothing. His eyes were large and deep and black and hard to read. The muscles in his face did not move.

“All right,” said Gray. “Maybe you hadn’t decided. But it had occurred to you. There was a good chance.”

Still, he said nothing.

“It makes you feel a little funny, doesn’t it?” said Gray. “You think because I’m white, American, it’s different. But you also know, deep down, that it’s no different, and that you could do it.”

It was a strange moment. Charles still wouldn’t speak. There was nothing else for Gray to do but keep going. “I just feel we should discuss this, since I plan on staying here a while. For example, I find it pretty amazing that anyone could be so convinced of his own personal importance that no one’s sacrifice is too great. I mean, how many people, Charles? Is there any limit? You and Adolf. You may not like him, but. How many, Lieutenant?”

Charles seemed almost to smile. He turned his head a few degrees and looked at Gray from an angle. He pointed his forefinger slowly at her chest. “I don’t believe you,” he said at last.

“What?”

“I don’t believe you’re amazed. That you don’t understand.” Charles took his rifle from against the wall and slid it onto the table in front of her. “There. If you thought you could get away with it. If there weren’t several hundred religious fanatics outside that door. Would you use this? On me?”

This time it was Gray’s turn to be quiet.

“See?” said Charles. “If you climbed out of your cockpit a little dazed from an insanely lucky crash landing and you were surrounded by crouching men with sharp poles, would you be willing to shoot just one of them to make a point?”

Gray said nothing.

“And if one, why not two, if that’s what it took? And maybe, Miss Kaiser, over five years it would take even more than two.”

Gray stared down at the gun. “So is everyone like this?”

Charles stroked his chin. He touched it with a certain surprise, as if he’d never felt it so smooth; he didn’t seem to like it. He took his hand away. “Some women wouldn’t pick up that rifle, would they? Even with Charlie Corgie ready to cart them off down the trail. But you would.” Charles looked at her steadily. “We’re not so different.”

It was appalling. Gray found herself flattered. That was how she knew he was right.

“I know,” said Charles, looking Gray up and down. “You think of yourself as some sort of warm, gooey-hearted darling. I don’t buy it.”

“How do you know what I’m like?”

“The way you move. That’s the way I get everybody’s number. I’m never wrong. For example, I’ve never met such a tall woman who walked around so straight.”

“You can tell I would shoot you because I have good posture?”

“Sure. And more. You use your hands a lot when you talk. They cut the air, slash, slash.” Charles did a comic demonstration. Gray couldn’t help but laugh. “Listen, I’ve made a study of this. I didn’t know the language when I got here. We used sign language. The natives signed completely different for the same word. Some signed way out here.” Charles flailed his hands on either side. “They’re wide open. Trusting. Crazy. You operate from the center. You keep your hands close in, stab and parry. You’d be good with a knife. And,” he went on, “you keep your chin up. You have an unnerving stare and a long stride. You’re sarcastic and you obviously think you’re so smart. In short, Miss Kaiser,” said Charles, taking his gun back from the table, “you move like a real bitch.”

Charles walked out the door, letting his hand graze her hip as he walked by. Gray let out a slow, controlled breath and ground her molars together. No one had warned her that anthropology was going to be so complicated.

Gradually Gray and Charles worked out their truce. Charles would allow Gray to study Il-Ororen as long as she did her part in promoting his mythology. Gray cooperated, but she didn’t understand how they got away with it. While they took the most obvious precautions with injury and excretion, they still sweated and coughed and laughed, ate and grew tired and slept long, heavy nights. There was a thin line between being improbable and being debunked altogether, and the two of them trod this line as precariously as she’d skirted the ledges to this village. It was a long way down.

The other abyss before them was their future. Gray would conclude her study, and then what? Likewise, Corgie’s religious gadgetry was nearing its demise: the spare airplane batteries off which he ran his miraculous radio were finally running down. His stores of ammunition were running down.

“Do you ever think about going back to the U.S.?” asked Gray one day.

“I’m a god,” said Charles. “Why should I go back and be a schmo?”

The trouble was, while when Gray arrived Charles had seemed beleaguered, he now seemed to be enjoying his life among Il-Ororen with great gusto.

While Corgie was working on his projects, Gray helped the natives with their spring planting. It was right before the rains, but the only crop Charles cared about was his ersatz tobacco, so Gray taught Il-Ororen about topsoil and terracing while Corgie milled wood. Their first conflicts were over allocation of labor. Gray wanted tillers; Corgie wanted lumberjacks. Finally, Gray asked in the middle of a ritual confrontation over a work crew, “Why are you building that stupid tower, anyway?”

“Because I’m going to put a restaurant on top, why do you think?” said Charles blackly. “Three stars, with a great view of the city lights.”

“It seems about as useful—”

“Just the point, I don’t care about useful. I will build a scale model of King Kong or a ten-foot wooden replica of the Great American Hamburger if that’s what I feel like. Understand? And if I wake up one morning and decide that I can’t live without an Egyptian pyramid in my back yard, then these poor bastards will spend the rest of their lives mining stone—”

“Until they starve to death, and you with them. That’s all very capricious, but without a few Egyptians growing bananas along the Nile, those pharaohs would never have gotten past the first story. Alot-too-toni,” she said imperiously to the men, and looking confusedly from Gray to Corgie and back again, they followed Gray down the path to her fields, leaving Corgie by his half-built Babel furiously without lumber for the rest of the day.

Grudgingly, Charles walled off a portion of his one-room Olympus for Gray. It was thanks to this arrangement that she discovered the advantages of being a god extended well beyond architecture.

Lying in bed one night, Gray heard the ladder outside clatter and a woman’s shy, nervous laughter. The ladder was withdrawn again, and set with a clack on the other side of Gray’s bedroom wall. Fully awake now, Gray listened stiffly to the noises from Corgie’s bed. She was used to his gruff, angry orders in the night; Corgie didn’t sleep easily, as, she thought, he had no right to. She was used to the occasional clatter of his rifle when it fell from his arms; though it was terrifying to wake this way, she actually preferred those times the rifle fell and even went off to what she was hearing now: the rustling, a chuckle, a light feminine squeal. A growl and snuffling as if an animal were rummaging through his things. Then, worst of all, the sound of Charles Corgie peacefully, silently asleep for the first time Gray had ever heard.

Gray’s toe cramped. She found she had a headache. Her eyes narrowed in the darkness. She rearranged herself loudly, sighed, and drummed the bedside with her fingertips. She was still awake when early that morning she heard the pad of small feet, a brusque grunt from Charles, and the ladder again, down and up. A great male sigh. Only then did Gray turn limply on her side and doze for a couple of hours.

“You slept soundly last night,” said Gray as they peeled mangoes at breakfast.

“Yes,” said Charles. “I feel refreshed.” He was imbedded in his mango up to the second knuckle.

Gray only toyed with hers, listlessly pulling the gooey orange strings apart and then leaving them in a pulpy pile. “I think you and I need to have a religious conference.”

“Convened,” said Charles. “Shoot.”

“Do you have to be so jaunty?”

“You’re always badgering me for being surly at breakfast. For once I wake up in a good mood and you run me down for that, too. I can’t win, Kaiser.”

Gray squashed a piece of fruit between her fingers. “I want to discuss a point of catechism.”

“Philosophy! So early, too. That brain of yours must start ticking away as soon as your feet hit the floor.”

“Some mornings,” said Gray. “But I don’t want to talk theory. I want to talk practice.”

“Which makes perfect, as I remember.”

“That depends on what you’re practicing.”

Having finished off his mango, Charles started in on a banana with large, lunging mouthfuls. “Want one?”

Gray shook her head. “You’ve got quite an appetite today.”

“I have quite an appetite, period,” said Charles. “So what’s our Sunday-school lesson for today?”

Gray crossed her arms. “Listen, I think we should discuss this, but not because I’m prim. We take so many precautions to avoid the appearance of mortality. But your adventure last night seemed perilously biological.”

Charles put his feet up on the table. “Kaiser, sweetheart, it’s great to hear you worry about keeping the old religion afloat. But believe me, when it comes to keeping an eye on my ass I am an expert—”

“Seems to me you had your eye on someone else’s last night.”

Corgie grinned. “They like it.”

Gray stood up. “Well, I don’t.” She walked out the door, Charles laughing after her.

“They think it makes them powerful,” said Charles, leaning over the ladder as Gray clipped rapidly down.

“That’s precisely my point,” said Gray. “I think it does.”

Charles must have watched her brisk and unusually rigid stride to her precious furrows with a smile on his face and a satisfied gleam in his eye.

In the process of overseeing the planting, Gray also conducted informal interviews. Especially after she’d applied first aid to several farming injuries, Il-Ororen confided in her completely. At the end of the day Gray would go back to Corgie’s cabin and take furious notes.

What fascinated Gray as she studied this tribe was that, on a scale of generations, they hadn’t been separated from the Masai very long. It seems they’d deliberately purged themselves of their own history. Maliciously they insisted on having no ancestors but those they could remember, no larger culture to which they owed their ability to throw pots, to mine and forge metal tools. Their creation myths and cautionary tales were no longer traditional Masai ones. While they still built kraals, they gladly constructed new blond structures. Nor had they gradually distorted Masai music, ceremonies, and dances; they had dumped them. Il-Ororen had invented themselves.

Most surprising of all, Gray now had no doubt that, while they resented particular tyrannies and didn’t understand the gymnasium, they cooperated willingly with Charles Corgie. She’d anticipated a gentle native population abused and manipulated by a cruel Western intruder. Instead, she found a ruthless people that had eagerly latched on to an appropriate sovereign. They liked Corgie’s projects. They enjoyed his anger as long as it wasn’t directed against them personally. They identified with his arrogance. They’d rooted Corgie deeply in their mythology, and told stories as if his arrival had been predicted for generations, like a messiah. Il-Ororen were the only people in the world, and they’d gotten themselves their own private god.

Gray’s concern, however, was with the arrogance that Il-Ororen and Corgie shared. It had bound them; it could sever them, too. A truly arrogant people were easily dissatisfied and individually ambitious. They would have a high leadership turnover. Corgie had been among Il-Ororen for five years, and that struck Gray more and more as a long time.

Several times a year Corgie had a church service.

“What if I don’t want to go?” Gray asked that morning. All around them Il-Ororen were painting themselves with colored clay and plaiting braids; it reminded Gray too vividly of Sunday mornings when she would pull the covers over her head while her mother put on makeup and fixed her hair with grotesque cheerfulness.

“Gray, darling,” said Charles as he prepared himself for the service, trying on his red baseball cap at different angles in his airplane mirror. “When you’re the one giving the party, you don’t get to decide whether or not to show. You’re on the program. How’s that?” He turned to her with the visor off to the back.

“Little Rascals.”

“Perfect. Now, Kaiser, you old cow, what are you wearing?”

Gray spread her hands. As usual, she was in khaki work clothes.

“You have no sense of celebration,” Charles chided.

“What’s there to celebrate?”

“Nothing more nor less than ourselves, Gray dear.” Charles was bouncing around the cabin so that the structure shook. “For you,” he added, “a tie.” He proceeded to tie a Windsor knot around his bare neck. In some wacky way, with the red cap, it was cute. Once Charles threw on his flight jacket, laced his boots over his pants, strapped on his Air Force goggles, and, the final touch, hung one of those long, hand-rolled cigarettes out the side of his mouth, he stood before Gray for inspection.

“You look—absolutely—insane,” she said, laughing until she fell over on the bed.

Charles flicked an ash. “Excellent. Now for you.”

“Not a chance,” said Gray. “The dignified anthropologist will take notes sedately in the back.”

“Don’t be boring,” said Charles. “What did you always secretly want to wear in church?”

“Khaki work clothes. I hated dresses.”

“Think again.”

Gray smiled. “Well. When I first got breasts, my mother used to foam at the mouth if I wore a low-cut blouse to church. So I’d walk out the door with my coat on, buttoned up to the chin. She’d find out about my neckline when we got there and take a scarf out of her purse, swathe it around my neck, and tuck it in the bodice. It would clash with my outfit, of course. I’d scream …” Gray laughed. “I tore it up once. Threw it down in the parking lot. I was like that.”

“You still are.”

“I don’t throw tantrums anymore.”

“You get what you want, though.”

“Yes,” said Gray, “everything.” She said this simply and with certainty; it must have disconcerted her later, since there were a few things she didn’t get—she was talking to one of them that morning.

“Then Gray will go to church in something plunging. Or how’d you like to go topless? It’s in vogue here.”

“Charles, I’d think you’d be bored by now with looking at women’s breasts.”

“Not by yours.”

Gray looked at her hands.

“All right,” said Charles with a clap. “I’ve got it.” He rummaged around the cabin until he found a long scrap of cheetah skin. “Your shirt.”

“No!” said Gray, but with Corgie’s urging she went behind her partition and tied it around her chest. For her skirt he dragged out his old parachute and began to tear off a long swath of the silk.

“Are you sure you want to rip that up?”

“Now, what good is a parachute going to do me in Toroto?”

“You never know when you’re going to have to bail out of here.”

“You bring that up a lot,” said Charles, tucking the chute around her hips, making a full, low-swung wrap, like a belly dancer’s. “My leaving. You don’t seem to get it, Kaiser. I’m gonna be buried here.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Ah-ah. No more morbid talk. Now, let’s see.” He patted her hip. “Step back.” She did so; Charles let out a slow whistle. “Terrific.”

Gray looked down at the thin band of animal skin around her breasts, the long flat expanse of her bare stomach, the blousy white silk draping down to her feet. She extended her leg between the folds and smiled. “It’s slit practically up to my waist, Charles.”

“Very sexy.”

“Are you trying to humiliate me?”

“Couldn’t if I tried. Whatever we put on you, the congregation will receive you with tragic seriousness.”

Gray put her hair high on her head, slipped on her sunglasses, and billowed down the ladder.

“Hold it,” said Charles. “Where’s that camera of yours? I want a picture.”

Gray told him, but by the time he returned with her camera she was disconcerted. “This will have to be developed, you know.”

Charles posed her by the ladder. “Raise your arm. Chin in the air. Come on, you’re a goddess! And let’s see that leg through the slit. Right.—Come on, what’s the problem? The pose is great, but your face looks like you’re still fourteen and your mother’s dragging you to church.”

“I just wonder how you propose to get this photograph if you’re going to be buried here.”

“Mail it to me,” said Charles, looking through the shutter. “Charles Corgie; The-Middle-of-Fucking-Nowhere; Africa. Or send a caravan. You’ll think of something.”

Gray managed to smile, though wistfully. Errol knew this. He’d seen the picture: the wind catching the white chute, which trailed off to the side, her leg streaking toward the camera, and the poignant expression of a woman who hadn’t yet finished a story that gave every indication of ending badly.

On the way to Corgie’s cathedral they processed arm in arm with Il-Ororen decked out and ululating behind them. Corgie held his rifle like a papal staff; Gray’s camera swung from her hand like an incense burner. Charles led her into the cavernous interior, with its one huge, unadorned room. The great thatched ceiling let in an uneven mat of sunlight over the dirt floor. As Il-Ororen passed into the sanctuary they went silent, threading in neat rows before the dais. Charles pulled Gray up with him on the raised platform before the crowd and waited with gun in hand for the gathering to assemble. When as many as could fit in the room were seated and still, Charles stepped forward. A baby began to cry. Charles pulled the trigger on his rifle, and the shot vibrated up through Gray’s feet. There was an echoing rumble through the crowd, though they quickly sat still again. The mother of the crying child pressed the baby to her breasts and cowered out the door. Gray looked up at the roof. There was a whole smattering of holes in the thatch the size of bullets, and when she looked down she saw they let in absurdly cheerful polka dots of sunlight at her feet.

Deeply Charles intoned his invocation. His manner was so serious, his voice so incantatory, that it took Gray several moments to realize he was chanting a Wrigley’s spearmint-gum commercial.

Gray stared.

“Knock, knock!” boomed Corgie.

“Hooz dere!” the cry came back, with the solemnity of a responsive reading.

“Mm-mm, good!”

“Mm-mm, good!”

“That’s what Campbell’s soup is!”

“Mm-mm, good!”

Somehow Charles kept a straight face. Gray stuffed her fist in her mouth.

Corgie launched into a hearty version of “Whoopee tai-yai-yo, git along, little dogies,” and rounded it off with a Kellogg’s corn flakes jingle. He gave them tips on freshening their refriger-ators with Arm and Hammer and painlessly removing corns. He exhorted the merits of Wombley’s uncrushable ties. For his sermon, Charles pulled a tattered Saturday Evening Post out of his leather jacket and read a rousing portion of “We’ll Have Fewer Cavities Now,” the stirring story of Bobsie Johnson of Brockton, Mass., and her battle with bad teeth. After the sermon he led the congregation in a moving rendition of “Little Rabbit Foo-Foo.” He had taught them the hand motions, so an expanse of several hundred African tribesmen bounced their fists up and down, “scoop-nup de field mice an’ bop-num on de head.” Every once in a while Charles would look over at Gray and smile. Gray shook her head. Listening to Corgie was like putting your ear to the crack in a playroom door.

Yet the gathering also functioned in a serious religious sense, perhaps to Corgie’s dismay. His English rambling seemed no more sardonic to his parishioners in its untranslated state than Latin to uncomprehending Catholics or Hebrew to unschooled Jews, so that the feeling in that assembly built to true spiritual frenzy despite Campbell’s soup. The audience swayed and clapped in the best revivalist tradition. Finally, when Corgie turned to the miraculous radio behind him and delicately tuned in the one broadcast he could barely pick up—a Swahili station that also played American music—the Il-Ororen were on their feet craning forward and at a pitch of silence. Gradually the grainy voices drifted in, then out, then in—Il-Ororen’s ancestors, men from other planets, gods, fairies, whatever, until the talking stopped and Corgie smiled; the reception became exceptionally clear and loud and Louis Armstrong’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” blasted across Corgie’s cathedral. Charles reached for Gray’s hand, and they danced across the dais.

“Kaiser!” said Charles quietly, “you’re a great dancer.”

Gray smiled. She was a great dancer. Errol had watched her join celebrations all over the world. And this must have been something. Gray at twenty-two and this handsome, outrageous man in his red baseball cap and goggles and little strip of a tie whipping across his bare chest, all in front of hundreds of Kenyans in a swoon. Whenever Charles twirled her around or swept her back until her hair brushed the floor, Il-Ororen whooped. Finally he spun her until her feet lifted off the floor, pulled her out and into a turn and a bow, and the song was over. Il-Ororen roared. At a nod from Corgie they poured happily out the door.

Gray and Charles stayed on the platform until the last churchgoer was gone. The expanse of the room was serene. “How much of that was for my benefit?” asked Gray softly. The question echoed.

“In a way, all of it. But I don’t usually read Leviticus, if that’s what you mean. Last time I read them ‘The Other Woman Was My Best Friend’ and made them sing ‘One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ to the last verse.”

“That’s real despotism, Charles. So what’s next?”

“Everyone eats a lot and gets drunk. Then I coach the football team.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Hey, Sunday afternoon, right? I’m an American missionary. I’d bring them beer and pretzels and narrow-mindedness if I could, but as it is, we have to make do. I sewed my own leather ball. Works pretty well, too. And I’ve changed a few of the rules.”

“Why?”

“Because I could,” said Charles.

“It must be frustrating,” said Gray, looking around the big empty hall.

“How?”

“Well, they don’t know you’ve changed the rules, do they?”

“No. So?”

“When you make the rules you can’t break them, can you? A funny sort of solipsistic hell.”

“My, we are talking mighty fancy.”

Gray settled her eyes on this strange dark man in his little red baseball cap. Poor Charlie had surely spent his Sunday mornings as a boy sending spitballs arcing between pews; yet now if he were to introduce spitballs into his services, the whole congregation would obediently wad and wet them, and little boys would grow to resent sopping them in their cheeks every bit as much as Charles had resented stale communion wafers on his tongue. Here was a heretic whose every blasphemy turned uncontrollably to creed. Adherence to his own religion must have followed Corgie like a loyal dog he couldn’t shake. Gray pulled his visor affectionately over his face. “All I mean,” Gray explained, “is it must be hard when no one gets your jokes.”

“Were you amused?”

“Very.”

Corgie smiled a little. He looked at her. “You’re beautiful,” said Charles.

“Thank you,” said Gray.

There was an odd, fragile silence.

“You dance great,” said Charles.

“You said that,” said Gray. “But thanks again.”

Corgie took off his red baseball cap and aviator goggles, stuffing them in his jacket. He had trouble fitting them in his pocket. “Eat something?”

“All right.”

Corgie took her arm and they walked slowly toward the door. For two people on their way to a feast, they were awfully reluctant. Finally they ground to a mutual halt. In the wide quiet of Corgie’s cathedral, the dust settled on its earthen floor. Spears of sunlight through the thatch lengthened and warmed as the afternoon sun grew lower and more orange.

“You must get lonely here,” said Gray.

“Yes,” said Charles.

They looked at each other. The smell of wildebeest dripping on coals wafted into the room. The smoke stung. Their eyeballs dried.

Gray smiled, with difficulty. She took an inward step. Corgie’s head made a quizzical turn. It was hard to know what to do. It was hard enough for Gray anyway, in Africa, so young. Of course certain pictures had flashed before her since she’d first seen this man by his tower, heard his rich, sadistic laugh, caught the glitter of his dubious intentions. But it was different to think things than to do them. Thinking, you could look the man in the eye the next morning and he knew nothing and you could smile to yourself and ask him to pass the mangoes. Thinking was a smug and private business. Moving your real hand to his face was a drastic and public affair. You could not take it back. It was like chess, when you took your hand from a piece, having moved it a square.

Incredulously, Gray watched her own hand rise to Corgie’s cheek. Stubble bristled at her fingertips. Raking into his hair, she found it thick and coarse. Why didn’t he say something? His expression was opaque. Her fingers crawled over his ear, to the taut muscles on either side of his neck. Still his eyes were secret. Gray felt frightened and stupid. Yet, having been taught since she was small to finish what she started, Gray pulled his neck toward her and raised her lips to his.

Later she could pretend it didn’t mean anything at all.

Suddenly it was as if she’d nibbled at a trap and it had sprung. His arms clenched her with the strength of a stiff spring; his sharp fingers sunk into her ribs like quick metal teeth. Gray felt her feet lift from the floor, and Charles Corgie carried her in his arms out the door.

Charles carted her through the compound, past Il-Ororen, who stopped and stared with their shanks of meat poised in midair. Gray curled against his jacket, resting her head in the hollow of his shoulder. Her feet dangled helplessly from his arms. Il-Ororen shouted behind them. Their cries rose and fell in waves, like the serenade of cicadas in pines, wild and demented. Gray nudged the leather aside for his skin underneath; his sweat stuck to her cheek.

Charles worked his hand under the band of her skirt at the small of her back; Gray could tell that the parachuting was now precariously tucked around her hips. When he reached the ladder he swung her over his shoulder. As he climbed she clutched at the skirt.

Inside, Charles slung her off and she felt herself free-fall to the mattress. She wondered if the parachute would open. Charles slipped his hand under the silk and cupped her hipbone, moving down to the inside of her thigh. With his other hand he traveled up her bare stomach to the tiny strip of cheetah skin, which had slipped dangerously low. Tiny rolls of dead skin gathered under his palm. Gray felt a little sick. Saliva squirted and pooled in her mouth; she had to keep swallowing. Corgie leaned over and took her earlobe in his mouth; hunger rustled at her ear. He moved to the cartilage and licked inside. The pressure in her head changed as he sucked the air out; she heard a splashing and yawning “ah-ah,” like the roar of a conch.

Corgie let himself down slowly on top of her. He was heavy; though compact, his body was dense and buried her beneath him. Gray sunk into the bed so that the mattress rose on either side of her. Every part of this man’s body was hard like wood. He closed over her like the lid of a coffin. She couldn’t breathe.

Corgie worked the gathers from her hips. Fold by fold he pulled the parachuting from her body. The material collected in limp rumples beside her, thin and wan and white like funereal linen. He exposed the sweep of her thigh. With one hard pull he snapped the band of her underwear.

Gray’s eyes shot wide. She jockeyed him across her until she slid his body off to her side. Gray lay panting as Corgie propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her with a smile one might use after an excellent appetizer, when the meal to come promised to be even better. He took a deep breath and followed the indentations of her ribs with his fingertips as her chest rapidly rose and fell. Her cheetah skin had inched down still farther, and he trailed up to the swell of her slight breasts, up, over, down; up, over, down. Gray didn’t imagine for a minute he had stopped. He was resting. He was restraining himself. That was his pleasure. For now.

“I was wondering when you’d come around,” said Charles. Her ear was up against his chest, and the cavity amplified the sound, like a tomb.

“Oh?” Her voice was small.

“Yeah. You’ve been pretty funny, I gotta say.”

Gray struggled up on her elbows. Trying to look casual about it, she shifted the parachute to cover between her legs. “How is that?” She didn’t like the idea of amusing him just now.

“Sleeping in your corner; playing the anthropologist.”

“Oh?” she said again, pulling a little farther up on the pillow. The crease between her eyes indented, just a little. Playing the anthropologist. Gray remembered the snuffling in the night. How many other women had lain here?

“But I figured pretty soon you couldn’t stand it anymore. Really, watching you’s been a riot.”

Gray looked over at him, scanning for some sign that this was any different for him than one more snuffling. “A riot,” said Gray. The indentation between her eyes was discernibly deeper now.

“A one-woman amusement park.” He licked his lips. He seemed pleased with himself.

Gray tugged at her cheetah skin, now threatening to slide off her breasts altogether. “And how else have I been entertaining you?”

“Tromping out in those fields of yours. Taking notes. It’s cute. But it’s been obvious from the first few days what you’ve really been doing here. Guess the study’s gonna be real in-depth, right?”

Gray pulled herself to a sitting position. She rearranged the straggles of her hair. She felt her face tingle and her ears heat; she was sure they were red. How did she get here? What was she doing in this bed? She tucked the folds of her skirt one by one decisively into its band. “Well, I suppose it takes me a long time to do my work, Charles,” she said quietly, “since I spend so much time daydreaming about when big handsome Charlie Corgie will finally kiss me good night.” Gray swung her legs over the side of the bed. She looked down at her outfit, for the first time finding it regrettably ridiculous. She decided she did not want to cry. She looked down at her lap and decided this was very, very important to her, and asked herself not to cry, the way you would ask a favor of a friend of yours.

“Getting your back up?” Charles went on behind her, still leaning on his elbow. “You’re not gonna tell me you don’t lie behind that screen just eating your heart out. Those sighs that keep me awake at night? They’ve cracked me up. And that night I brought a bedwarmer up here? Next morning you went nuts. It was hysterical.”

Gray slowly uncurled and brought her spine straight. Her eyes were sharpening. “Funny,” said Gray. “I don’t remember going nuts.”

“Sure you did. But now’s the time to look back on it and laugh, right?”

“So far only one of us is laughing.” Gray rose from the bed. She was six feet tall.

“Come back here, toots, we’re just getting started.”

“No, we’re finished,” said Gray calmly, smoothing the billows of her parachute down her hips. “I’m going to hoe. I guess I’ve just looked forward to this with you so obsessively for so long, all the while pretending to be a professional at work on some silly study, that now the time has finally arrived and you deign to look my way, I just can’t handle the excitement.” Gray started out the door.

“Okay, you’ve made your little speech, now come back here.”

Gray started down the ladder.

“Come on,” said Corgie at the top, suddenly more serious. “Give me a kiss and forget it.”

Gray paused mid-step.

Encouraged, Corgie continued: “We’ve wasted plenty of time already, right? All these weeks we could’ve been having a fine time. Get up here. You look great. You’re driving me crazy.”

Gray came back up the ladder.

“That’s more like it,” said Charles with a smile. He gave her a hand up, but when he put his arm around her she slipped away, angling past him through the doorway.

“I need my work clothes to hoe.” She whisked back out with her khaki in a bundle and brushed coolly by again. In no time she tapped back down the ladder and strode off between the manyattas.

“You don’t know what you’re missing!” he shouted after her.

“I don’t expect I ever will!” she shouted back.

“That’s right, don’t think you’ll get a second chance!”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to live with that terrible disappointment.” Her parachuting swirled out on all sides, alive like white flames.

Corgie watched her go from his porch. No doubt he muttered something like “She’ll be back,” but, an intelligent man despite his recent behavior to the contrary, he wouldn’t be so sure.

chapter five

These scenes have their satisfactions, but they cost you. In Toroto, everyone paid for this one. Something had gone wrong; the script was awry. No one was happy. No one got what he wanted. Errol decided this is what it was like:

Corgie had “bedwarmers” almost every night. He laughed a lot then. He was loud. Gray lay on the other side of the partition trying to keep her breathing slow and audibly even. Yet the more asleep she sounded, the more Corgie rocked the frame of his bed. When he reached his pitch Gray even tried snoring. Finally neither of them slept well, or woke jaunty.

More than ever, they threw themselves into their separate projects. They drew up separate crews. The tribe was split tacitly down the middle, like troop divisions.

The tower got higher. Corgie liked to climb to the top at sunset very far away from everything.

Corgie had another worship service and Gray didn’t come. He hadn’t invited her. He came back and said it went wonderfully, though Il-Ororen seemed sodden enough afterward and didn’t fix much food; they mostly got drunk.

The rains made everything worse. Gray would record interviews, with irritation helping his cause with the miracle of her machine. Corgie would lope in long, hapless laps through the expanse of his gymnasium. But it was the tendency of the rainy-day mind to stay home. Gray would lie about in her corner craving a book to read, but in lieu of that, starting to write her own. This was no relief, though, as she wrote about Il-Ororen, and she was beginning to despise them—they all seemed just like Charles Corgie. For distraction she made herself a deck of cards from the stiff dividers in her notebooks. Refusing to play with Charles, though, Gray was left with solitaire. She hated solitaire. Gray tried drawing next, but she didn’t draw very well, and disliked doing anything she did badly. She wanted to hear music. She wanted to read a newspaper. She wanted to have a conversation.

Instead, they gave each other directions, edicts; they informed each other of passing incidents with great economy of language, as if every word were being telegraphed overseas.

Charles cleaned his guns. He worked on a new model. For several days Gray wouldn’t ask what the model was of. Yet the severe angular structure, with its jagged points and narrow corridors and tiny rooms with no doors, did not shape into anything recognizable. Finally Gray came up to Corgie in the midst of a torrential, desperately endless afternoon and asked, “What is that?”

“A monument.”

“To what?”

“To whom.”

“You decided the tower wasn’t pointless enough?”

“I’ve passed beyond functionalism,” said Charles mildly, “to pure form.”

“Pure something,” Gray muttered.

“What’s that?” asked Charles nicely.

“Is that just a monument?” asked Gray. “Or your gravestone?”

Charles turned to her squarely. “Now, why do you care?”

Gray turned away. “It’s a boring afternoon,” she said flatly. “It’s raining. It was something to say.” Gray wandered back to her corner and pulled the curtain tightly shut.

During the rainy season Il-Ororen worked in clay, for it dried evenly in the moist air. Out of raving boredom rather than anthropological duty, Gray made water jugs on rainy afternoons. To satisfy her own sense of irony, Gray fashioned Grecian urns with Apollos and Zeuses curling from the handles and sending fire and lightning bolts down the sides of the bowls. The women were delighted, and fouled Gray’s already limping study of their traditional vessel forms by immediately copying hers—one more eager betrayal of their fusty Masai inheritance. It didn’t matter whether Gray’s innovations were better so long as they were new. They imitated urns and Chinese vases and squat British teapots indiscriminately, though they did not make tea. Gray had never read of any African tribe so taken with modernity.

The kraal where Gray potted belonged to Elya’s family, once, before Corgie, the richest and most powerful in the tribe. The father had been the chieftain before Corgie arrived; Charles had shot him early on. Yet the remaining wives did not seem to hate Il-Corgie, and took Gray into their homes with deference but no anger. Corgie’s murder of their husband seemed to make sense to them. Unlike most of the Masai tribe, Il-Ororen had no problem with killing, as long as it worked to your advantage and you got away with it. The wives clearly admired Corgie for felling such an imposing man as their husband, and spoke of the scene of his death not with grief but with awe.

The sons, however, kept their distance. The oldest, Odinaye, regarded Gray with suspicion when she came to the hut. Even for a Masai he was tall and grave. His eyes smoldered before the fire while she built her vases. He would stare silently at Gray for hours through the smoky haze between them. Gray couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She would sometimes try to make conversation with Odinaye, but he never responded with anything but even keener scrutiny.

Gray began to notice Odinaye in her vicinity too often. She would look down from the porch when she was eating lunch and find him staring up at her with steady, unblinking accusation. She would lose her appetite, and go inside.

With Odinaye so often a few paces away, Gray found it increasingly difficult to slip off into the bush alone to attend to her all too mortal toilet. When she and Corgie had their dry, cryptic tiffs in the middle of the compound, Gray would turn and find Odinaye watching from the sidelines. Gray found herself talking more softly; though they were using English, she had the eerie sensation of being overheard.

“I’m being followed,” Gray finally told Charles. “By Odinaye. I dream about him now. He’s there every time I turn around.”

“Maybe he’s in love,” said Charles.

“This is serious.”

“Isn’t everything serious lately?”

“What should I do?”

“Why come to me? You’ve got a problem. So take care of it.”

It was an ordinary afternoon. Gray was struggling with a large water jug. She’d gotten the clay too wet; the sides were collapsing. Odinaye’s presence on the other side of the hut, crouching and staring as usual, was especially irritating. She couldn’t help suspecting—was it only the play of smoke between them?—that there was a wisp of a smile on his face today. She was sure he could see she was having trouble—well, any idiot could see that; the thing was falling apart.

Gray decided to take advantage of her role as the leader of the avant-garde and cave in the sides intentionally. She composed her expression. When one side fell in again, she looked down at it archly and revised a dent here and there, as if that was exactly what the goddess of modern pottery had in mind. Imperiously, she told Odinaye to give her the wooden paddle beside him; she would bat in the other side, too.

“Here it is,” said Odinaye, handing her the paddle readily.

Gray accepted the paddle before she went white. Now that he was closer, his small grim smile was unmistakable.

The daring of the avant-garde potter left Gray entirely. Awkwardly she used the paddle to bat the collapsed side back out again. Using props inside the jar, she secured the sides and quickly put it aside to dry out. When she dipped her hands in a pot of water to rinse off the clay, she noticed they were shaking. Not saying another word, she ducked out the doorway and went straight to Charles Corgie.

“What’s going on?” asked Charles, leaning on his bed with a cigarette as Gray paced the room. “Why can’t you sit still?”

“Would you stop worrying about the way I move for once and listen to me?” Gray whispered.

“I’ll listen if you talk loudly enough for me to hear you—”

“Shsh! Talk more quietly.”

“WHY?” Charles boomed.

“Shut up!”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Shoot.”

“I was working on a pot that wasn’t going very well—”

“So your pot didn’t come out pretty and now you’re mad?”

Gray looked at him; there must have been something in her face to make him sit up without quite the same sultry boredom and put out his cigarette.

“Odinaye was there, naturally,” she went on in a low voice. “I said, ‘Hand me that paddle,’ and he picked it up and said, ‘Here it is.’”

Charles waited. Gray didn’t go on. “And?”

“That’s it.”

“Some story,” said Charles.

“Yes,” said Gray. “It is.”

“I guess it’s one of those subtle narratives that depends on texture.”

“Charles,” said Gray. “He said ‘Here it is’ in English.”

Corgie sat up. “No.”

“Yes.”

Corgie stood and paced. “Well,” he reasoned, taking out another cigarette, “one phrase. Big deal.”

“No, he knows at least two, Charles. I made a mistake. I asked for the paddle in English, too. And I didn’t point. He knew the word ‘paddle.’”

“So? Here it is. Paddle. So?”

“How do we know how many other words he’s picked up, Charles? What else has he heard?”

Charles grunted. He smoked fast, as if his cigarette were hard work to get over with. “Damn it.” He paced some more. “Jesus, we’re gonna have to be careful.” He was speaking more softly now himself.

Gray sighed. “He obviously figured out the language by watching us interact.”

“When have we been doing that?”

“We do still fight sometimes.”

Charles sunk into a chair. “So—what? We’re going to talk even less than we’ve been doing? I don’t even know if that’s possible.”

“Do you know any other languages? French, German, Latin?”

“Nope. But you do, of course.”

“That wouldn’t do any good if you don’t know them, too.”

“Why not? We could have our own separate languages. You could walk around speaking German. I can definitely see it, Kaiser.”

“Well, say. How’s your English vocabulary?”

“Me? The poor uneducated architect? All I know is damn, fuck, and shit. Jane-loves-Puff. Go-Timmy-go. You know that.”

“Stop it. We have to work on this. I mean, we have to—cogitate on our—contretemps.”

“Say what?”

“Odinaye may have learned go-Timmy-go. But he hasn’t learned perambulate-Timmy-perambulate.”

“Let me get this straight. When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I’m supposed to yell, ‘Oh, coitus!’?”

“Exactly.”

“This is going to be disgusting, Kaiser.”

“Or fun. As long as we can’t be heard we can drop it, but if we have to talk to each other in public we should only palaver, parley, or discourse.”

“Or lately, harangue, wrangle, or contend.”

Gray laughed as Charles leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Maybe their learning English is all for the best,” said Gray softly. “Maybe they’ll finally appreciate that your invocation is a Wrigley’s spearmint-gum commercial.” With a rare moment of affection, Gray reached out with a wistful smile and tousled his hair.

The plan seemed to work to a degree. When Gray and Charles were in earshot of Odinaye, they switched to their most professorial language, and Gray could tell by the light panic with which Odinaye’s eyes followed the conversation that he was no longer picking much up.

The whole vocabulary scam might have issued in an era of reconciliation, but Gray’s lexicon was considerably larger than Corgie’s. When she used a word he didn’t know, he would furiously stalk off in the middle of her definition. To her credit, Gray wasn’t trying to impress him but simply to use an effective scramble on their broken code. To her these multisyllabic marathons were an entertainment, like crossword puzzles.

Charles had his eye on another sport they could share, though; he waited impatiently toward the end of the season for a few dry days in a row. Finally the rain did let up for a week, and the ground was hard enough for Corgie to introduce Gray to the pleasures of his tennis court.

Charles claimed to have played an excellent game back in New York before he was drafted, and told Gray it was tennis he missed more than any other element of Western civilization. After setting a full work crew to refurbishing his court, he walked Gray proudly around its hard-packed clay. He’d had the crew lay down the sacred white lines with ash and string up the heavy hemp net the women of the tribe had woven. He showed her two rackets—laminated strips, soaked and bent and bound at the bottom with a leather grip. Carved at their throats were antelopes on one, lions on the other. They’d been strung with wet gut; as the gut dried it tightened, so the tension on the strings was surprisingly high. The rackets were a little heavy, but lovingly made, and beautiful.

Corgie’s most controversial achievements were his tennis balls. He’d scrounged rubber out of the carcass of his plane and bound it with hide. They were, Gray conceded, miraculously spherical, but the bounce was another matter. “But they do bounce,” said Corgie, taking his ball back from her ungrateful hands. “You try to make a tennis ball.”

Corgie led Gray happily to his court, swishing the air with his racket, the lions at its throat in a position of yowling victory. Charles stretched out before the game with large animal glee, like a predator who’s been cooped up in his lair too long and is ready for a hunting spree.

Il-Ororen gathered around the court with enthusiasm, and Gray called Corgie’s attention to Odinaye’s presence in the front row. “Heed your vernacular.”

Charles snorted and went to his side. He didn’t know the word “vernacular.”

“I attempted to—instruct this—population,” said Corgie after a couple of rather handsome warm-up serves, “on this—pastime. They didn’t—comprehend it. Every—primitive I—inculcated—played a lob game.” He went on quickly, irritated with the vocabathon. “I like a good hard rally, Kaiser. This counts.”

When she tried to return his serve, it thudded into the net.

“You ever—indulge yourself in this—diversion before, Kaiser?”

“Once or twice,” said Gray. That was all she said for the rest of their play.

On Corgie’s second point he double-faulted, but on the third Gray socked the ball into the net again; Corgie looked archly sympathetic, though he should have noticed that she’d nearly gotten the ball across this time. “It takes time to—accustom yourself to the—facilities,” said Charles. “First game’s practice.”

Gray did win one point in their practice game, and Corgie was elaborately congratulatory. Compliments can be far more insulting than criticism; she hadn’t won on a very good shot. Still, Gray gathered her lips together and said nothing.

Later, Corgie no doubt regretted his concession on the first game as practice, for Gray “accustomed herself to the facilities” quite readily. And Gray didn’t play a lob game.

Corgie stopped making conversation. He lay into the ball with his full weight, but consistently started driving it into the net. His eyes blackened; his stroke got more desperate; his game plummeted. In fact, the whole set was over in short order. Corgie strode with steely control past Gray, his grip on his racket tight and sweaty. The lions at its throat were whining.

“You don’t desire to consummate the entire match?” asked Gray.

“No, I do not desire to consummate the entire match,” Corgie mimicked her through his teeth. “You didn’t tell me you were some kind of all-Africa tennis champion.”

“You didn’t inquire.”

Charles started to walk away, and Gray called after him, “Il-Cor-gie!” He turned. “Would you have preferred that I feign a fraudulent ineptitude?” Gray was exasperated with having to talk this way; the words themselves made him angry.

“I don’t need your condescension,” said Corgie.

“And I don’t need yours.”

Corgie waved his hand and shook his head. “This is pointless,” he said, and walked away.

It was pointless. Gray had just wiped the court with Charles Corgie and she couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel victorious. She looked down at the antelopes on her racket. They looked back up at her with their antlers at a sheepish angle and their soft wooden eyes forlorn.

I can’t find my tape recorder,” Gray told Corgie in the cabin the next afternoon.

“You mean you lost it?”

“No, I know where I left it. It’s not there anymore.”

“Someone took it?”

“If you didn’t—I think so.” Gray felt a funny sense of trepidation.

Charles reached for his gun.

“Charles—”

“Then we’re going to find it. They have never taken anything from here before. We’re going to nip this sport in the bud.” He checked that the gun was loaded. “You think that asshole who knows the word ‘paddle’ knows the word ‘tape recorder,’ too?”

“Odinaye is a natural suspect.”

“Good. We’ll see if he knows the words ‘Hand it over’ and ‘Say your prayers.’”

“Charles, it’s only a tape recorder.”

“When there’s only one of them and it makes you a god, there’s no such thing as only a tape recorder.”

Gray followed Corgie warily down the ladder.

When they got to Odinaye’s hut, sure enough they could hear from outside the snap of buttons and the whir of reels; snatches, too, of native conversation about funeral rites. “How appropriate,” Corgie muttered as he ducked inside.

In the corner was a dark figure huddled over the machine. Corgie dragged the man outside by his arm and threw him down. In the light, though, the figure turned out to be Odinaye’s younger brother Login, who was only fourteen. Login crumpled at Corgie’s feet, with his face to the ground. The only sound the boy made was a high, raspy breath, which hit eerie harmonics. Corgie took the safety off his rifle.

The wives, including Login’s mother, quickly gathered around the scene, not daring to interfere. They said nothing. Gray turned and found, with no surprise, Odinaye, tall and silent and glowering ten feet away.

“Okay, you son-of-a-bitch.” Corgie addressed Odinaye in English. “You know those words, mister? You should. Son-of-a-bitch. Now you listening to me? I don’t know for a fact that you took it, so I’m not going to shoot you. But you’re going to watch.”

“Charles—”

“Go get the recorder.”

Gray retrieved the machine. Charles announced in Il-Ororen to the crowd that Login had stolen the sacred voice box. Then he picked the boy up and propped him against the wall of the hut.

Gray put her hand on Corgie’s shoulder. “Charles, we’ve got it back now—”

Corgie brushed her hand off and, with astonishingly little ceremony for a god, took the rifle to his shoulder and shot the thief against the wall, right in the heart.

The shot echoed back and forth between the cliffs of the valley, but died quickly; so did Login. Corgie slung his gun back over his shoulder and left Il-Ororen behind him blithely, the way he might walk away from one of his models with the dark clay figures posed in their attitudes of worship or chagrin. With one glance at Odinaye, who looked back at her with a stiff, unfazed resolve that seemed oddly familiar, Gray trailed after Charles, carrying the hallowed tape recorder. That’s right. That look, it was Corgie’s.

When Gray walked into the cabin Corgie had his back to her and was looking out the window. “Go ahead,” he said shortly, not turning around. “I’m ready.”

Gray stood staring at Corgie’s back, watching those broad shoulders heave up and down from the kind of breathing he might do before battle. For a time she said nothing. She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t rallied the disgust she would need now. It must have been disturbing to enter a room with a man whose gun was still warm, with a dead fourteen-year-old down below, and not feel sufficient revulsion. Gray was shaken, but right now her deepest wish was to sink her fingers into the bands of his neck and relax the muscles, to rearrange his frayed black hair. Gray must have been asking herself what Errol had always wondered, too: how could she overlook that Charles Corgie murdered people? Maybe she wasn’t a “warm, gooey-hearted darling,” but she had her limits and one of them had always been shooting a young boy at five paces. No, she didn’t go for that. How could she go for that in Corgie? Was she actually attracted to a man who shot fourteen-year-olds for stealing tape recorders? Did that impress her? Or did she understand that he didn’t know what he was doing? That Charles’s vision was narrowed enough that for him firing at natives was no different from shooting down ducks at a county fair? Could she forgive that poor eyesight? Yet even if people are born a certain way and end up a certain way for reasons out of their control, aren’t there actions you hold them accountable for, regardless? Wouldn’t Charles be convicted posthaste at Nuremberg? Or would Gray Kaiser be the one stolid juror who would vote to let him off the hook?

Errol had never answered these questions to his satisfaction.

It was with reluctance, then, that Gray began now, though there was one long moment when she actually considered keeping quiet and massaging his neck; in that same moment she also understood that he was tired and upset and would have let her. Instead, she said for the second time, still from across the room, “Charles. It was only a tape recorder.”

Corgie sighed at the window. His body slumped, as if he could feel the fingers withdrawing from his neck. So it was this again. They were both good soldiers, but there were days—Gray, why can’t we shut up? It was hard enough to shoot that boy. Why can’t we drop it? But instead he said, “What was I supposed to do, Gray? Slap his hand and send him to his room? Or sit him down and ask him, If everybody did that, what kind of world would we live in?” He turned around. “Gray darling, we’re not in school anymore. We’re in the middle of Africa. Keeping up this immortality stuff isn’t just a game.”

“It is in a way,” said Gray. “You set the rules. Didn’t you choose to be immortal?”

“That’s right, to save my ass. I saved it, I have to keep saving it. Haven’t we been through this?” Their talk was still without heat. The argument was tired. “In Toroto religion is a matter of life and death. It is for me. So it is for them. It’s only fair.”

“All of which fails to explain why you had to shoot a fourteen-year-old boy—”

“All of which does explain it!” Corgie at last took a few steps toward her, at last gave his voice some edge, some pitch. “I swear, Kaiser, you just don’t want to understand, do you? You just have to be against me. Have to be on the other side.”

“Of this, yes.”

“Of everything and you know it. Kaiser, the irony of this whole business is that I have never met a woman more like me in my life. Lady, you surpass me! I mean it! You bitch all the time, but you took to divinity like a fish to water!”

Gray’s chin rose a little higher. The idea of massaging this man’s neck was now out of the question. “I have done here,” she said coldly, “what I had to do. For my work and for my own survival.”

“Which is what I said, but it doesn’t wash when I say it.”

“I haven’t killed people.”

“You haven’t had to! I do it for you! Why do you think they’re afraid of you, Kaiser? Why do you think you’re still alive? Why do you think nobody’s stolen your lousy tape recorder before now? Darling, you’ve cashed in. Your ticket was already paid for.”

Gray shut her mouth.

“But come on, Kaiser. It hasn’t been so bad, has it? Ordering guys around? Being revered?”

“Actually,” said Gray, “I’ve found it quite uncomfortable.”

“You’re so full of shit!” shouted Corgie. Gray took a step back. For all the reluctance with which this argument began, it was in full swing now; she’d never seen Corgie so angry. “You eat it up, don’t you think I can see that? Oh, you’re nicer than I am, I’ll give you that, but that’s because having them worship you isn’t enough, is it? You have to get them to like you, too. You want them to worship and adore you. At least I have the humility to let them hate me as long as they bring me my supper every night.”

Their voices were carrying. Outside, the sky started to rumble; after a moment it poured. “Convenient,” said Gray. “The gods are fighting. Venting their wrath on Il-Ororen.”

“If there is a real one,” said Corgie, “He’s on our side. We’ve been lucky. You are dangerous. You may have a good time playing Jesus Christ, but I’ve never met more of a human being in my life.”

“That should be a compliment, but it doesn’t sound like one.”

“Oh, cut the humanism shit, will you? For a minute? I mean the reason you’re dangerous is that you’re so jealous. And that’s one big giveaway. That’s the most mortal emotion I know.”

“Jealous of what?” asked Gray incredulously, raising her voice over the rain.

“You can’t stand it that I got here first, can you? You can’t stand not having this whole shebang to yourself, can you?”

“That is—” Gray turned red. “That is the most ridiculous accusation I have ever heard—”

“Miss Gray Kaiser, valiant, beloved anthropologist—everyone goes to you, bows down, asks for advice, but Miss Kaiser doesn’t need anyone, no—”

“You mean I don’t need you.”

The two of them stood face to face. Perhaps they were gods now, at this moment, and this was omnipotence: to know exactly how little they cared. Glaring at each other silently, both Gray and Charles recited together their real credo: Who cares about you, or anyone? Who needs you, or anyone? I blink and you disappear. I turn my back on you and all I see is the door that I can walk out of, always. I am tall and smart and powerful without you. I can make jokes and laugh, and then they are funny. I can write down thoughts and read them back and nod, and then they are wise. I put my hands over my ears and hum, and the things you say that so upset me could be birdcalls or the radio or a fly. You think I want you, and sometimes even I think that, but you are wrong and that is weakness in me, for I am stronger than even I know. I am a god. I am making it rain now. So if I want you to evaporate like a shallow puddle in the bright heat of my brain, then you will shimmer in this room and dissolve into the heavy air and I will not care—I will be thinking about what I would like for dinner; I will be thinking about my important work; I will sleep well at night and get up the next morning deciding what I want to wear. Goodbye, Charles Corgie; goodbye, Gray Kaiser. Only someone outside of us will be able to remember we were ever standing in the same room, that we ever laughed at the same jokes. Since no one else was there, no one will remember that we ever held each other on that bed and kissed and ran our fingers through each other’s hair.

Perhaps at the end of their litany both Gray and Charles looked around the room in confusion, wondering, To whom am I talking, anyway? I must be talking to myself. So, since there was no one else in the cabin, Gray did not need to excuse herself, but turned on her heel and walked out the door. It must have been disconcerting for a woman who could control the weather to step into a torrent and immediately be drenched to the skin.

Charles turned away and went back to building his model. Yet had Charles watched Gray a moment longer he would have seen her fall from grace most literally. Her foot slipped at the top of the ladder to pitch her ten feet through the air to the thick black mud below.

As she lay spitting mud out of her mouth, Gray was sure that her left arm had never been in precisely this position in its life. She thought, Get up, but for some reason she did not get up. All that rose were her eyes, and as she took them up from the ground, they met a pair of long, muddy, patient feet, and, at the top, other eyes, with great frightening whites and too much intelligence. Gray found herself thinking rather irrelevantly that Africans were lucky to have waterproof hair. As strands dripped into her face, she wished hers would bead like that, with smart gleaming droplets crowning her head. For the goddess was looking poorly; Odinaye, princely and serene.

“I help you?” asked Odinaye in English, extending his hand.

Gray didn’t take it. She felt suddenly as if the arm under her chest were a filthy secret she should keep to herself and protect. “I’ll be fine,” said Gray, pointedly in Il-Ororen. “Even a god must rest sometimes.”

“Kaiser,” he said, like Charles. “No rest in ground.” There was that gleam in his eyes again, that slight smile at his mouth, as he grasped her right arm and started to pull her up. When Gray gasped on her knees he let go. It had been a small, dry cry, but it was unmistakably the sound of pain.

With his eyebrows high and a look of feigned solicitude and surprise, Odinaye looked down at Gray’s left arm. Gray, too, couldn’t resist discovering what was hanging on the other end of her elbow. The flesh was swelling and purpling as they watched. There was a foreign object poking into her arm. It took her a full moment to realize that the object was sticking not in but out—that it was her own bone. All of this was bad enough, but worst of all for the immortal on her knees was the other, that substance, and Gray kept wishing it would rain harder; but the rain could not wash down her arm fast enough to rinse away her bright-red secret winding its watery way in streams to the tip of her elbow and pooling in the crook of her arm.

“Oh my,” said Gray, “look at that.” She tried for a tone of mild, disinterested curiosity; to a surprising extent she succeeded, too. Yet the whites of Odinaye’s eyes loomed large before her, and she was sure now that this man knew her every weakness, her every flaw—that he could see not only that her bones were fragile and her blood red as his, but that she had stolen a roll of Life Savers from a drugstore when she was ten.

“I call help,” said Odinaye, and he was now unabashedly smiling, his teeth sharp, shining in the rain.

“No—” said Gray, but Odinaye was already shouting; four other natives appeared around her. She thought clearly: They are witnesses. Coldly Gray requested a board. Refusing any other assistance, she placed the wood under her arm and stood, carefully holding her limb before her like a roast on a platter. All this while the natives stared, and not so much at her arm as at her face. Gray knew this and gave them a fine performance. Those muscles were a miracle of ordinariness and careless physical comfort. Standing straight as ever, Gray dismissed her parishioners and balanced herself elegantly rung by rung up to Corgie’s cabin. It was a shame Charles missed this ascent—it was one of those moments he would have hated but also admired, the way he felt about most things she did, but maybe for once the admiration might have won out. It was hard, after all, to strike a fine figure covered in black mud, or to look that haughty and regal and unaffected when in the very process of being dethroned.

“I think we’re in trouble,” said Gray from behind Charles.

“Woman,” said Charles, not looking up from his model, “we’ve been in trouble from day one.” He may not have fallen at her feet for returning so soon after such a fight, but for once his woodchips would stay where he put them, and he bound the sticks with dry grass easily and with satisfaction.

“We’re in extra-special trouble today.”

There was a strain to her voice, but after such a scene he’d expect that. “So you came back,” he said, still focused on his monument, “to admit you don’t mind being a goddess. Why don’t we have a drink on it, Kaiser?”

Charles put his knife and grasses down and turned around just as Gray was saying, “Maybe two.” Though her vision was dancing, Gray did succeed in watching Corgie’s face go through a transformation—all its cockiness sloughed off. Gray wondered if she’d ever seen Charles look—serious. “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Charles, reaching immediately for the board on which Gray’s arm was laid, and taking her swiftly to lie on his bed.

Gray kept trying to explain reasonably what had happened and to warn him about Odinaye while Charles cleaned her up, but he kept telling her to shut up, and finally she did. Gray did not protest when Charles took off all her clothes, which were caked with mud and soaked through; he undressed her tenderly, but also with a careful asexual air. She was surprised she didn’t mind lying before him naked. Without embarrassment she let him sponge her clean. He covered her slim, shivering body with a blanket. At last he reached for her left arm, swabbing it delicately. Gray turned her head to the side and pressed her cheek into the pillow.

There seemed to be a commotion building outside.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Charles, pushing her back down.

The sound got more insistent. Waves of discontented murmuring washed through the room.

“You know, Kaiser,” said Corgie softly, brushing the matted hair away from her forehead, “we’re going to have to put that bone of yours back. You might need it someday.”

Gray nodded, and tried to smile. “I had,” she said, “grown rather attached—”

“Shut up,” said Charles fondly.

Outside, there were shouts. For a few bars the crowd struck up a chorus. Its words were unmistakable: “White skin! Red blood!” Il-Ororen shouted. “White skin! Red blood!”

Charles acted as if he heard nothing. “I’m going to get you some honey wine. I’d give my right arm right now—if you’ll forgive the expression—for a good bottle of brandy, but then it would also be nice to have morphine and a hospital and the entire faculty of Yale Medical School. Wine will have to do.” Corgie started out the door, paused, turned back to take his gun. As he walked out of the cabin the crowd grew silent.

“Dugon.” He spoke calmly in Il-Ororen to one of the natives in the front row. “Bring me two jugs of honey wine.”

Dugon looked at the warriors on either side of him and then at the ground. He shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“Dugon,” said Corgie with exaggerated patience, “did you hear me? I meant now.”

“Il-Cor-gie,” said Dugon, not looking Charles in the eye, “is it true about Ol-Kai-zer? That her bones break and her flesh bleeds?”

“Dugon,” said Charles, bearing down on the warrior with those eyes of his that could do their work awfully well when they had to—even if Dugon was already convinced that Charles was a mere mortal, he was discovering it didn’t make much difference. “You changed the subject. We were speaking of wine.”

Yet Dugon was surrounded by warriors who made small motions of discouragement; Dugon looked up at Corgie with an expression of appeal.

Charles let his gun dangle down toward Dugon’s head. “Remember this?” Dugon nodded. “Do you doubt my magic enough to test it? Because whether or not Ol-Kai-zer bleeds may be in question; whether or not you do is not.”

Dugon bolted from the crowd. Corgie watched him go, and waited for his wine serenely, looking down at Il-Ororen as if holding court.

“Odinaye claims Ol-Kai-zer bleeds!” a native braved at last. “Show us the arm of Ol-Kai-zer!”

“Since when,” said Corgie, “do you tell me to do anything?”

Since never. His eyes razed the crowd, rich and dangerous. Il-Ororen went silent, back in church. Corgie stood over them, his eyes rather than his gun poised, aimed at them, cocked, until Dugon ran back with a jug of wine sloshing in each hand. He stopped, breathing hard, and then lifted them reverently to Corgie on his porch. With one final freezing glance, Corgie turned his back on Il-Ororen and returned to Gray.

“Intimidation isn’t going to hold them very long,” said Gray dully from the bed.

“Why not? It’s held them for five years. Now, drink this.” Gray had several sips, then shook her head. “More.” He poured it in her mouth until the wine dribbled down her chin.

“Just like a man,” said Gray, wiping the wine away with her good arm. “Trying to get me drunk.”

“That’s right,” said Charles, “this is what I should have done to you a long time ago.” Charles leaned over and kissed her lightly between the eyes. “Now drink some more.”

“No, Charles, I can’t. It’s just making me sick. Besides, it’s not going to make that much difference and you know it.”

Charles stood up and sighed; Gray realized that he was interested in getting her drunk partly in order to put off resetting her arm. Charles looked down at it, its temporary dressing beginning to show red; his face paled.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”

“I bluff with them all the time,” said Corgie, gesturing outside. “This …”

“You’re not in your train set anymore.”

Charles looked up and down the length of Gray Kaiser, as if memorizing her hard. “You do seem life-size.”

“Go ahead, Charles.”

It was one thing to shoot a piece of clay in the chest; it was quite another to work the bone back into the skin of a woman who actually existed. Corgie took a long swig of wine.

Corgie picked up her arm and put it down again. Breathed. Tried again. Breathed.

Charles did it. He straightened her arm, and worked that horrible red thing back inside her limb, closing the folds of her flesh over the bone, burying the secret of her mortality back where it belonged. He took one of the sticks from his model monument as a splint and swathed the break with parachute silk. When he was finished, the sweat was pouring down his cheeks as freely as down Gray’s. Breathing heavily, they wiped the moisture from each other’s face.

The chant outside had changed. “Show the arm of Ol-Kaizer!”

“Maybe we should show it to them,” said Charles. “They might be impressed. I did a good job.” And Charles did seem more proud of this achievement than she had ever seen him be of his dominance over Il-Ororen, or even of his precious architecture.

The tone of the gathering outside was angrier now. It sounded like nothing less than a lynch mob. Once in a while a stone hit the side of the cabin.

Gray lay on the bed, trying to keep her mind steady, for she felt she’d need a clear head soon. She was right. Corgie began to clean his gun.

“I’m sorry,” said Gray.

“For what?”

“For that uproar. It’s my fault.”

Corgie stopped oiling his trigger. “It’s not your fault you broke your goddamned arm. I mean, you’re not a god, are you? Isn’t that the whole goddamned problem? I swear, you get into this stuff too deep, you start believing it, and you look down at a cut on your arm and, sure, the natives are surprised you bleed, but the thing is, so are you. Well, we bleed. And it’s hard enough to go around bleeding all over the goddamned place without feeling guilty about it. I mean, for Christ’s sake, Kaiser, doesn’t it hurt?”

Gray shrugged, winced, let her shoulders carefully back down.

Charles went back to cleaning his gun, ramming the rod down its barrel. “I’m telling you,” he continued, thrusting the rod in and out, “you’ve seen too many real, real stupid movies, Kaiser. The old ones, maybe, without any sound. God, give me a woman who screams once in a while. Give me a woman who cries sometimes, and who throws her arms around your goddamned neck and begs for forgiveness—”

“Forgiveness!”

“Woman looks down at a broken arm as if she’s some kind of robot with a few wires cut. Comes in here to be repaired. Practically took out my soldering iron by mistake, Kaiser.”

A rain of stones pattered against the front wall of the cabin.

“Charles,” Gray asked carefully, “have they ever gotten upset like this before?”

“No.” He tried to sound casual.

“Charles,” said Gray, “your airplane doesn’t work, does it?”

Corgie laughed, beautifully. “I’d love to be in that movie of yours, Kaiser. The one where the two of us leave in a cloud of dust and turn into a speck in the sky. That’s a nice ending.”

“You mean it doesn’t,” said Gray heavily.

“Of course, then there’s the helium balloon.”

“What?”

“You know, when I give Odinaye an honorary degree for being so smart—and hell, a purple heart for bravery; the guy’s first-rate, let’s face it—and float off and leave the Emerald City behind.”

“And I click my heels. We’ve made these jokes before.”

“For once in my life I have more important things to think about than new jokes. We’re going to have to make do with the old ones.”

The whole cabin shook. Corgie checked out the window and shot over the head of a man grappling up a stilt; the warrior dropped back to the ground.

“Charles, what if they storm the cabin? Are the two of us just going to pick them off as fast as they come?”

“Us! Since when do you approve of shooting people?”

She looked down. “Since now, maybe.”

“No, Gray,” said Charles sadly. “We might squelch this for a little while, but one rifle is nothing. Here this gun is like a scepter. The kingdom’s falling, Gray, and without a kingdom a scepter is a stick. Now, come here.” She came over to the window wrapped in a blanket; keeping an eye outside, Corgie made her a sling. He told her while he tied the knot, “I’ve always wanted to be in a revolution. I’m just surprised to end up on this side of things is all.” The cabin shook again; Charles turned away from his handiwork with tired irritation, to shoot once more over the head of a would-be visitor and have him drop to the ground. “Show the arm of Ol-Kai-zer!” rang through the room.

“Would it help if I went out to them?” asked Gray.

“They’d run you straight through,” said Charles calmly. “Christ-like, but still not very appealing. Now, go get dressed. Put together a little food and a knife and some water. Pronto.” He gave her a pat on the ass, as if treating himself to a moment of pleasant masculine condescension.

“What for?”

“You’re going on a trip. The back pole is still an exit they don’t know about. The trail is covered in brush all the way to the cliffs, right? Now get going.”

“Then,” she said uncertainly, “I should put together enough food and water for two.”

Charles fired another shot. When he turned around again he looked angry. “Don’t just stand there,” he said in the same tone he used with Il-Ororen. “Move it.”

“But why—”

“Idiot! How are the two of us going to saunter off into the horizon? With the music playing and the sun setting and the credits rolling happily down the screen? Why don’t you use your mind a little when we actually need it? They’re mad at me, Kaiser. Haven’t you noticed? They’re peeved. They’re peeved at you, too, gracious agricultural consultant that you might have been. Our friends have been had, darling. They want in here. No one is sliding down that back pole without someone else at this window with a gun. It may be only a scepter but it still packs a punch. Now pack up and get the hell out of here before it’s too late, and we both end up skewered on the same spear like one big messianic brochette.”

“But, Charles, why don’t I take the gun and you slide down the pole?”

Charles looked at her squarely. “Is that an offer?”

“Yes,” said Gray. She drew her blanket closer around her and looked away from Charles, embarrassed. She didn’t know what she was doing. She’d said yes because it sounded nice. That wasn’t enough.

Charles said nothing until she looked back at him, at a face that was haggard and regretful. It was a face that knew what it was doing. “You couldn’t,” said Charles. “Your arm … Besides, I might be able to talk them out of this. You’d never swing that. You don’t have the clout.”

“But all those Kenyans you’ve shot. If one, why not two … Remember?”

“Your first morning here. You were excellent,” said Charles with satisfaction. “You impressed me enormously that day.”

“But you said there was no limit.”

“And you said there was.” Charles smiled philosophically, glancing out the window to find the natives were getting restless. Once more, though, he did not fire into the crowd but shot off a tree branch over their heads. It crackled and fell, scattering Africans beneath it. Charles turned back to Gray. “Well, touché. You were right.”

“What’s the limit, Charles?”

“You,” he said readily.

“That’s it?”

“Yep. Just you.” The simplicity seemed to please him.

Gray would not understand this for a long time. Already projecting herself into this coming confusion, Gray asked Charles one more thing: “Even if I make it—later, how is this going to make me feel?”

“Alive, for one thing,” said Charles. “Swell. And maybe lousy, too.” Gray still didn’t move, so Charles had to explain patiently, “You’ll feel like you owe somebody something. And you will. Just not me. Pass it on. Give him my regards.” And then Charles looked out the window again, in a pang of jealousy over someone who, as it turns out, was not yet born.

Gray went to her corner, dressed, and packed her knapsack. It must have sickened her to remember to take the rolls of film, the tapes, all her notes—to even now be planning on cashing in on her “study” should she succeed in returning home. It would have been a relief then, when Corgie instructed her from the window, “Don’t forget those notes of yours, Kaiser. You write all this up and you get this published, understand? I want to be immortal somehow.”

When she finished packing, Charles carefully threaded the strap of her knapsack around the sling. A spear flew through the window and lodged in Corgie’s mattress. They did not make a joke about it. Gray looked at the spear, deep in the bed. Feathers from the hole floated up through the air and caught in Gray’s hair. Corgie picked them out one by one. All the sourness was gone from his face, the vengeful glimmer. There were a lot of things to say, but it was too late for all of them, so the two kept quiet and stones rattled against the door and Charles Corgie kissed Gray Kaiser, ol-murani, goodbye.

In the oddest way, Gray did not quite enjoy it. It was, simply, not the kiss of two people who had loved each other hard and had to part. It was the kiss of two people who had fought each other up until the very last minute. It was a reminder, in its unfamiliarity, of what they had not been doing.

Charles helped her down the pole from above. That hand extended, keeping her poised above the ground for a moment before it let go—the long, tired tendons, the skin still dark and oily from cleaning his gun—was the last she saw of him. Silently she crept through the brushy pathway to the forest, making her way to the trail she’d followed down the cliffs on the way here. Deftly, dutifully, quietly, she hiked the narrow switchbacks, while behind her the rhythm of Corgie’s rifle increased steadily, like a final salute. Yet soon after she started up the mountain, the firing stopped altogether. Gray decided she was too high to hear anymore. Later, when she could no longer see into the valley, she was sure she heard an explosion she couldn’t explain.

While the pain in her arm was keen, Gray was grateful for its steady distraction. It was despite the wound rather than because of it that Il-Ororen might have made out down her cheeks the tears which far more than blood proved her a human being.

The trip back was grueling work, and Gray bore down on it. She slept poorly, with the snarl of cheetahs at the edge of her ear. Gray told Errol later that those days on the trail she was as close to being “an animal” as she’d ever come, in a compulsive, dead migration to the rest of her herd. The body persevered. The mind went numb, speaking only to say: Don’t step there; avoid those ants; this branch is in your way.

She did make it to Hassatti’s tribe. Though in a fever, she refused to rest more than a couple of hours and insisted on being taken to Nairobi right away. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened, and made the bumpy trip in a pickup truck in silence. When she reached the city, she hired a man to take her in a small prop plane over the peaks of Kilimanjaro.

During most of this trip, too, she didn’t speak, nor did she explain her purpose. She gave her pilot directions until she recognized the deep valley surrounded by the plunging cliffs she’d stared up at so often from the hammock on Corgie’s veranda. She told the pilot to fly closer; circling, the plane drew lower. Trees obscured the muddy huts, but Gray was not looking for traditional architecture.

“Wait,” she said, “this might not be the place.” Gray scanned back and forth across the valley. “Closer.”

The plane swept lower, and Gray wondered how Il-Ororen must feel, seeing another god fly by—were they ready for their next messiah? No, surely they’d made do with the old one. Charles was such a resourceful man, he had that way of talking to them—and they’d always listened to him in the end, always. Well, they enjoyed him, didn’t they? He was a fun god. Most certainly he’d pulled something. And wouldn’t Charles be surprised when they landed roughly between banana trees and Gray Kaiser stepped out of the cockpit, smiling, finally able to kiss him and take him up in the sky with the credits rolling?

Gray’s eyes darted across the familiar valley, panicked. “This can’t be right,” she said. “Maybe these valleys look a lot the same, I don’t know …”

There was no tower. There was no treehouse, no gym, no cathedral. The plane flew closer in, at Gray’s insistence, to the pilot’s distress, until, there—she got her bearings. Gray fell back in her seat.

“Msabu wish to land? There is not space—”

“No,” said Gray. “Take it back up. Take me to Nairobi.”

“If Msabu wish to more look—”

“No,” said Gray. “I’ve seen enough.”

The small plane soared back up, its passengers’ ears popping. Below, the long, narrow valley grew smaller, but Gray couldn’t help but see even as the plane rose quite high the four black scars of charred flat earth and a few wisps of smoke trailing from these patches, like the last sad smoldering of crematory ash.

chapter six

Errol scanned the compound in the dying light. The sites of Corgie’s projects had seeded nicely and were overgrown. Despite their disregard for history, none among Il-Ororen had yet dared plant his own manyatta in these clearings. The patches remained plush and tangled, like small city parks.

So far this return visit was going well, and Errol fought off his own wistfulness. Errol had a peculiar weakness for other people’s nostalgia. This helped him as an anthropologist but confused him as himself. He wondered that he never found his own memories as compelling as those of other people. This was a gift, he supposed; there were certainly enough people walking around absorbed in their own lives. While his imagination was sometimes out of control, Errol preferred that to being trapped with his quiet father, his dominating older sister, and his attachment to Gray long past the age he should have been anyone’s protégé. Errol’s own life made him feel claustrophobic, and these departures relieved him, as the long breaths of cooling air did now while he watched the sun drain behind the cliffs. It was a romantic setting, he had to admit.

So far their return had unearthed a few interesting postscripts. Odinaye had taken over the tribe after Corgie, but he’d made a mistake. When you institute a new regime, it mustn’t look too much like the old one. Yet Odinaye had tried to become Corgie II. Before he burned it to the ground, he ransacked the cabin for mementos. When he rose to prominence, he donned the red baseball cap, leather flight jacket, and aviator goggles he had found there. He wrapped the remains of Corgie’s parachute regally around him, and used many of the words he’d learned from listening to Gray and Charles: Here it is. Give me that paddle. Il-Ororen were impressed for a while, but they’d heard this before, and in better style.

Furthermore, Odinaye was no architect. Early in his reign he commanded a palace of his own, to be taller than Corgie’s tower. Halfway through construction, the place crumpled into a heap. Corgie’s true disciple, Odinaye blamed the workmen and had them executed; wisely, he didn’t try another palace and stayed quietly in his own hut.

It was the radio that felled him. Odinaye had made sure to salvage the device before the arson, but in lugging it away, he must have disconnected a wire. When he staged his own service—remembering many of Corgie’s ads for Campbell’s soup and a couple of verses from “Liddle Rabid Foo-Foo”—he turned at its climax to the wondrous supernatural machine and—silence. There was a riot. The radio was destroyed, along with its ineffectual new master.

Soon after, Gray’s study hit the Western press, which not only sent her career hurtling to eventually overtake Richardson’s—who was now only a fortunate footnote in Gray Kaiser’s life—but also sent a phalanx of Western civilization down on Il-Ororen. Surprise, more airplanes; surprise, better radios; surprise, English. Surprise, just a lot of strange, pale primates—so many of them, as Hassatti might have warned, disappointments.

Il-Ororen revisited were a slightly defeated people, though nicer, as Gray herself had remarked. They had lost their existential edge, and in its place was an attractive relaxation with being unimportant. They smiled more. They sat more. There were more fat people.

And, boy, did they talk about Charles Corgie. Corgie stories were a local pastime. While Il-Ororen may have mellowed, they still had that malicious streak in them from way back—their favorites were about the fires. As they told these tales, their eyes flecked with yellow light. Best of all, they loved to tell of Corgie’s last gesture. When the bullets had ceased their regular reproof overhead, Il-Ororen had finally climbed up the stilts of the cabin, suffering by now highly exaggerated injuries from the protective spikes skirting the porch, and bursting into the main room to find both Il-Cor-gie and Ol-Kai-zer no longer there. Nervous but inflamed, guerrilla parties scoured the area, though they needn’t have; Gray was well up the cliffs by now, and Corgie sent up a flare. Standing on top of the carcass of his plane, Charles fired in the air. A large crowd gathered. In his most terrifying voice, he ordered them from the plane. Gradually they backed off, Corgie training his gun on the group until every villager had withdrawn. Only then did he shift the rifle from the crowd and point it at a tear in the tail of his plane. With one bullet, as if he’d rehearsed this before and knew where precisely to aim, he detonated a bomb he never dropped on the Germans, and Charles Corgie left Il-Ororen in a blaze.

It was Corgie’s warning rather than the splendor of his departure that made an impression on Gray. Errol, too, was surprised that Charles urged the villagers away from the plane. It seemed out of character. In Errol’s experience with egomaniacs, they liked to take as much of the world down with them as possible; in a time of nuclear weapons this was a chilling thought. Yet Charles, in a moment of peculiar humility, left by himself.

While Gray was relieved to hear of Corgie’s consideration, she didn’t have much of a taste for these stories. In fact, Errol had to admit she didn’t have much of a taste for this whole project. Gray was still in her hut, no doubt flat on her mat, with eyes of stone. If this torpor of hers went on much longer, they would have to pack it in.

Yet the air tingled. Errol’s breath quickened. In the indeterminate gray light Errol felt edgy and could not stand still. The story of Charles Corgie rooted and tangled in his mind, as if it were not quite over. His eyes darted across the compound; always something seemed to be moving in his periphery, but when he looked over he found only trees. The light was funny. It was still bright enough to see, but not, it seems, what was actually there. Errol felt a strange nervous grip under his rib cage; he had the unreasonable feeling he should be pacing before Gray’s hut, standing guard.

Oh, Gray, Errol thought, looking back on this evening much later. It had been too early to be asleep. Dusk is a time to be preyed upon. Wise herds are astir, on their feet with their heads high and eyes open, but Gray stayed in bed with her long, bony head at a forlorn angle against the mat, picking up the pattern of the tortured weave in her cheek. The brush outside the compound rustled. It was not the wind. Bare feet pattered across the hard-packed earth of Toroto. Old women spoke in low whispers. They’d been frightened before, and this was ridiculous. Weren’t Il-Ororen savvy now? They ate Almond Joys and Pez candies. They complained in their own language about static and weak stations. They knew the word “tape recorder” and how little magic it really was, without money. Some even had guns, and no longer particularly admired them. Yet anthropology is not about nothing. There was a culture here, and it rose. It believed in ghosts, despite Pez candies. And here their protector slept with her head on the mat, as if, because Charles Corgie had been “just” a man, there were no more mysteries.

You couldn’t blame them for being frightened, though once again they’d made a mistake. Il-Ororen needed no protection. He was coming for a woman “very tall and very strong and very brilliant,” though a woman with her length reaching toward she didn’t know what anymore, her strength turning to an irritation, her brilliance casting about in the dark until it shattered aimlessly into a disappointed dispersion across the night sky.

It was dark now. Errol was surrounded by whispers and running feet. When he felt a hand on his arm, he started.

“He is alive!” It was Elya, with her voice low. “He has returned!”

“What?”

“I tell you, he has come back! And he has not grown older.”

“Who?”

“Il-Cor-gie!” she said breathlessly.

Errol’s mouth twisted, and he was glad she couldn’t see his face in the dark. Sometimes Errol was not a perfect anthropologist, and all this admirable myth and culture soured into native weirdness. It was late, and Errol had had a hard day. What in Christ’s name was she talking about, anyway. “Maybe you’d better talk to Ol-Kai-zer,” said Errol. He’d worked on this dialect before the trip, but maybe he wasn’t understanding her right. Besides, this was annoying and Errol wasn’t in the mood—he’d finished that interview himself, and Gray was just lying there. Do a little work, Kaiser. On your feet.

But another woman had already run into Gray’s hut and was dragging her out the door. Gray, too, looked confused in the light of the woman’s lantern. Several women clustered behind her as she approached Errol.

“What’s all this about?” asked Gray, with the same unanthropological annoyance.

“Damned if I know. Something about Corgie still being alive if I heard right.”

The women tugged on Errol and Gray, with a strange combination of fear and excitement. “He is back!” they kept saying. “Il-Cor-gie has returned to us!”

As Errol and Gray went with the women, the natives pushing them toward the center of the village, Errol muttered quietly to Gray, “Why do I feel as if I’m in the middle of a New Testament reading?” Gray laughed.

It was getting chilly. Gray and Errol rubbed their arms. Amid the chatter and the quickened air and the odd, unexplained secret they were approaching, the evening had an offbeat holiday atmosphere. There was a glow in the center of Toroto that proved to be a bonfire. Its light cast brilliantly on an unfamiliar figure with such intensity that the man with his hands held gently before the fire seemed to be aflame himself.

As they drew nearer, Gray slowed. The man in the flames looked straight at her. Gray stopped. Took a step. Stopped. The sound of her breathing at Errol’s side cut off altogether, as if she’d forgotten to inhale. Finally she herself stepped into the surreal molten glow of the fire, and stood, once more a statue; stone.

Errol looked away from his mentor to the man on the other side of the fire. Flames licked across his line of vision; the face burned among the yellow tongues. Errol found it hard to swallow.

But Charles Corgie was dead. Charles Corgie had fired his gun at his own bomb and exploded. Or were Il-Ororen lying again? Had they allowed Corgie to escape and made up that final episode? Then how would they have known about bombs to make up such a story?

On the other side of the fire there was a tall, dark Caucasian with a hat. His hair was black, his stubble heavy and rising, his eyes sharp and unblinking, but he could not be more than twenty-five. Even if Corgie had slunk away to rule another tribe, or moved to Nairobi and sold car insurance for thirty-seven years, he would still be over sixty now.

Errol started to speak, but Gray shook her head. She smiled more sweetly than he’d ever seen. In the hiss of escaping steam and the pop of knots, Gray seemed lost in a dream from which she had little eagerness to wake.

“What is your name?” asked Gray at last.

“Sarasola,” said the man. “Raphael Sarasola.”

Now, thought Errol. Wrong name. The joke is over. But Errol did not sense the feeling in the air change.

“I was unaware,” said Gray with evident pleasure, “we’d become a tourist attraction.”

“You made it one,” said Raphael.

“You read my book?”

“The parts that interested me,” he answered coolly. It was something Charles would have said.

Several women crept up to Raphael and laid offerings of bananas and dried meat at his feet and scurried away. Raphael looked at them without enough surprise, as if he was used to being given things. He picked up a banana, and peeled it.

Gray could not take her eyes off him. “How did B.U. happen to send me an assistant who hasn’t even read the whole book?”

“There are other ways of getting what you want besides spending a lot of time in the library.”

“You’ll have to explain those sometime.”

“I won’t have to. But I might.” Errol thought distinctly, He doesn’t behave like a graduate student. “Don’t worry, though,” said Raphael. “They sent you the right man, all right.”

“Yes,” said Gray. “I think they did.”

There was more silence; the fire popped. Errol was beginning to feel something he’d never felt before. Terror.

“I’ve been traveling for two days,” said Raphael. He threw the skin of his banana into the fire and watched it sizzle. “I’m tired.”

Gray led Raphael to the hut where she and Errol were staying. Errol trailed after them.

“That’s my mat,” Errol mumbled when Gray showed the new assistant where to sleep. Gray didn’t seem to hear. “That’s my pillow,” he said more loudly as Raphael unrolled his sleeping bag.

“You can live without it for the night,” said Gray quietly. “He hasn’t slept in days.” She whispered good night and walked softly out of the hut, pulling Errol with her, as if leaving a sleeping child.

They ambled back toward the fire. “You didn’t introduce me,” said Errol after a time.

“Sorry,” said Gray, not paying the slightest attention.

They sat down on the warm stones before the bonfire, and though she’d been in bed only an hour before, “absolutely disgusted and tired and stupid,” Gray’s eyes were alive now, and she sat on the edge of the stone rubbing her hands together. “You know, I’m getting a lot of ideas for this film,” she said. “It could be exciting.”

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