Above the dash I could see that the LIE had become a frozen, curving conveyor belt of red brake lights. It was so bad even the jackasses on the shoulder trying to cut people off were jammed to a halt.
Surrounded by my bulky camera case, laptop, and carry-on, I checked the time on my iPhone for the five hundredth time. It was looking like making my 9:05 a.m. flight to Africa was going to need divine intervention in order to happen. I also noticed an e-mail from Natalie and made the mistake of opening it.
You don't have to do this.
I sighed. Maybe my girlfriend was right. Maybe this was nuts. Wouldn't it make more sense to head out to the Hamptons with her instead? Get some sand in my shoes. Eat some oysters. I could certainly use a Long Island iced tea or ten, not to mention a tan. Couldn't this trip wait?
No. I knew full well it couldn't. I was committed to this thing, far past the point of no return. Hamptons or no Hamptons, HAC was happening. Right here. Right now. Right frigging everywhere. I could feel it in my pores.
I went through my travel kit again. I sorted through my passport, my insurance, my federally mandated less-than-three-ounce travel toiletries, my skivvies, T-shirts and shorts, my red wool hat. Then I scooped up my antimalarial doxycycline pills that had spilled over my folded-up poncho until everything was wired tight.
To hell with the naysayers. I was good to go. Botswana or bust. The last thing to do was print out my e-ticket when I got to the airport, if I ever got there.
When we finally started moving, I took out a map of Africa. I was a forty – sixty mix of nervous – excited. Just the sheer size of Africa. Three times as big as Europe. I had learned so much about the continent during my first trip, when I was still in grad school, but this was different. This was no field trip.
The cabbie quit nattering into his Bluetooth and turned to me.
"Which terminal, sir?" The airport was finally beginning to crawl into sight.
"I'm not sure," I said. "My flight's on South African Airways."
"You are going to Africa? South Africa?" asked the cabbie. I'd been preoccupied-now I noticed the guy looked and sounded African himself. His voice had that melodic lilt of African English. Nigerian, maybe.
"Botswana," I said.
"You go from New York to Botswana? No! For real?" the cabbie said, his red eyes wide in the rearview.
He seemed even more skeptical than my girlfriend. I was getting nothing but unbridled support and good omens from all corners tonight.
"That's the idea," I said as we pulled up in front of a bustling terminal.
"Well, I hope is a busy-ness trip," he said as he printed my receipt from the meter. "You make damn sure is a busy-ness trip, mon, you know what I mean."
I did know what he meant, unfortunately. He was referring to Botswana's AIDS epidemic, the second worst in the world. One out of every four adults in the country was supposed to have the dreaded sexually transmitted disease.
I wasn't too worried about it. Between my long trip and dealing head-on with a frightening global epidemic, I didn't think I'd have much time to squeeze in any hot, wild, condomless third-world sex. Besides, I had a girlfriend.
"Don't worry," I told the cabbie as I opened the door. "I won't have any fun at all."
Chapter 12
ABOUT FOUR HOURS later I woke up thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic.
Blinking in the low, lonely roar of the 747's cabin, I raised my seat and looked out the window beside me. Through spaces in the milky floor of dim clouds I could see the silver squiggles of the surf on the ocean far below. I definitely wasn't in Kansas anymore-or Queens, thank God.
I yawned, unlocked and lowered my seat-back tray, and worried my laptop out of my carry-on bag. I was going to write some e-mails, but instead I found myself clicking open the file for the HAC PowerPoint presentation I'd shown in Paris.
It began with a photograph of a primitive painting from the famous Lascaux caves in France that clearly showed a guy being killed by a bison. Next was Rubens's Chained Prometheus. In the painting, the torment in the upside-down Titan's face is pretty damn visceral as an eagle tears into his, well, viscera. The Rubens was followed quickly by Nicolas Poussin's haunting Renaissance painting The Plague at Ashdod, depicting a scene in which God has sent a plague of disease and mice onto the Philistines for disobeying him.
Next came stranger, darker, lesser-known images.
I felt my pulse skip a little when an ancient sculpture of a reclining jaguar appeared. It was found in an Aztec temple along with an apocalyptic prophecy of animals devouring all humanity.</ol>
The jaguar was followed by an eerie illustration from the Toggenburg Bible. It shows a man and a woman dying of bubonic plague. There's something about its bright, static flatness-a characteristic of medieval art-that makes it particularly disturbing. The naked figures lie stiffly in bed like paper dolls, their pale bodies polka-dotted with protruding buboes. The Black Death, which killed 40 percent of the known world's population, had been started by marmots and carried throughout Europe by rats.
I looked out the window again. As I stared out at the clouds thousands of feet below me, and the ocean below that, I had a strange sensation. It was a sinking, chilling feeling. For a moment, hurtling six hundred miles an hour toward Africa, I felt suddenly very tiny and very alone. I wasn't religious, but as I sat there, I started wondering about the inexplicable nature of these things.
It was as though I could actually feel the apocalyptic shift that was occurring. I thought of horses, birds, snakes. I thought of the curse God puts on the snake in Genesis: he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel …
The wrath of God?
Or maybe it was just my jet lag, I thought, rubbing the gunk out of my eyes. There was no doubt that I'd become obsessed with HAC. I thought about all the sleepless nights; the quitting school. And now I was actually on a plane to Africa. Maybe I would finally find the answers I was looking for. Or maybe I was delusional. I was beginning to doubt my own sanity.
I glanced down at my laptop and saw that I had another e-mail from Natalie. This one was a real picker-upper.
Oz, I know this is probably a bad time to say this …
Oh, boy. I knew what was coming. I almost quit reading then and there. The same way I looked at my bank statements in those days. Just flick my eyes over it, knowing I don't want to see it. Anyway. I read the rest quickly:
… but I've been thinking about everything, and I guess, bottom line, I just can't do all this anymore. At least not now. I just got back my immunology midterm. I flunked it. I'll be lucky if I get a C now. It's not just that. I'm distracted, and I have to concentrate on school and my career. I know I shouldn't e-mail all this. We'll talk when you get back. And you need to get someone else to check on Attila. I'm too swamped.
Okay, then, I thought. Whoopee. I'm back on the market.
I considered replying to her e-mail, but then decided to just ignore it, leave things alone. I couldn't turn back now. Natalie knew that, and I knew Natalie's priority was to become a doctor. She'd always been clear about that. Maybe we did need a break.
I'd just have to call the other woman in my life. I left a message for Mrs. Abreu on her machine, begging her to feed Attila for me until I came back. She wouldn't let me down.
I closed my laptop and stretched. I had twelve hours to go before I reached Johannesburg for my stopover. I reached into my laptop bag for my iPod, put in my earbuds, cranked some Black Sabbath, and headed down the aisle of the speeding plane in search of the stewardess and some Red Bull.
BOOK TWO
INTO AFRICA
Chapter 13
MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Africa, twelve hours later, was actually sort of a letdown. Johannesburg, beyond the massive windows of the airport, was just a bunch of nondescript buildings; it could have been Cleveland.
An hour later, when we took off northbound for Botswana, my mood lifted considerably. The green-and-tan expanse of seemingly endless landscape looked the way the little kid in me wanted Africa to look. Hot, wild, secluded.
As we were beginning our final descent into Maun, I saw there were some modern buildings, but most of the structures were cinder-block and tin. Coming down the steps onto the tarmac, I saw that, beyond the flimsy chain-link fence along the airport's perimeter, there were donkeys everywhere. There were also rondavels, the traditional African thatch-roofed round huts built of stone and cow dung. The feel of the place-the heat, the sweetish smell of manure and diesel, even the sharp, blinding yellow light-was pleasantly strange.
After I made it through customs, Abraham Bindix took off his tattered straw hat and greeted me with a bear hug inside the run-down terminal. Abraham was a boiler tank of a man. Broad-shouldered and blocky, the fiftyish, weather-beaten man reminded me a Sun Belt college football coach. His face was as hard and creased as an old work glove, with a mustache fading into the scruff on his cheeks. A shag carpet of chest hair burst from the unbuttoned neck of his sweat-dampened linen shirt. Some faded blue tattoos on the furry wine barrels he called his arms were reminders of his navy days. It was good to see his loopy, gap-toothed smile. The last time I'd seen him was in Paris. We'd sat at the hotel bar and gotten drunk as swine after I'd been booed off the convention stage.</ol>
He seemed heavier than I remembered him in Paris. He also seemed noticeably older, and a little slower on his feet. I wondered if he was ill.