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Story: "Numerology" by Christian Michener Essay: "Driving to Madness" by Peter Chilson Poem: "The Falling Out" by Marjorie Stelmach
Numerology
by Christian Michener
The girl Ryan Callaway was following turned off the Boulevard St. Michel, where Ryan knew every shop and office, and onto a side street that he hadn't been on before, even though he had been wandering the city streets for weeks. She walked past a papeterie and an abandoned shoe store and an art gallery selling glossy prints of American movie posters and then led the way into a dimly lit office that once might have been used by an insurance salesman. To Ryan the room smelled like his parents' basement back in the states, a wet and musty resting place for the broken appliances and old clothes the family couldn't bring themselves to part with. In the office were a half-dozen desks, each so small and fragile that they seemed ready to collapse under the weight of the books and folders piled on them. Each of the desks had its own plastic chair beside it, and at some of the places people sat and talked in pairs. Along the walls and stacked in corners of the room were dozens of boxes, many of them peeled open, partially revealing colorful objects inside that Ryan tried to see. Maybe they'd help him understand why the girl had brought him there.
The girl asked Ryan to sit down in one of the chairs, and as she settled herself behind the desk next to it, Ryan saw that he had been wrong, that the girl was a woman really. She was a little older than he -- in her late twenties, he'd guess. She kept her black hair short, and the skin on her face looked worn, as if dulled by wind and sun and soap, so that its color was a fading yellow under the florescent bulbs of the room. Her face reminded him of the plaster statuary he saw in college administration buildings, casts from Greek or Roman digging sites that caught your attention even as their shine dulled and yellowed. A few moments before, the woman had stopped Ryan on the street and asked if he'd come with her to see something, though what it was he hadn't been sure of -- his French wasn't the best. He had followed her to the office because he found her pretty and was glad for the adventure, a diversion from wandering the city streets, a habit he had started a few weeks before. It was what he did during the day instead of attending classes at the university like he was supposed to. "Are you from around here?" the woman asked him in French.
"Dayton," Ryan said. When he saw her blank look, he added, "In the United States. In Ohio."
"You're a long way from home," the woman said, though Ryan had the feeling she had no idea where or what Ohio was. As he watched, she reached for a book that was on the blotter on her desk, and when Ryan saw its colors, bright red and yellow, he realized that this was what was in all the boxes. The room was filled with books, thousands of them. About ten more copies of the same book the woman held stood upright along the back of her desk. On its cover was a burning sun and the shadows of a cross and an eagle spread across the sands of a desert, though Ryan saw no real cross or eagle anywhere in the drawing to cast the shadows. "This is Leonard Harmon's latest," the woman said, handing the book to him. "It's also his most important."
"Who's Leonard Harmon?" Ryan asked.
"That's what I wanted to tell you," she said. She tapped the air in front of her, her way of wagging her finger. "For your own good." She fell then into a breathless, rambling monologue that had something to do with Harmon's difficult inner-city youth in Chicago before he had the answers. The answers to what she didn't say or Ryan didn't hear. Harmon had les solutions and des rèponses, but what were ses problëmes? Youth? Chicago? Poverty? Ryan couldn't catch all she said. He still didn't know who Leonard Harmon was, except that he grew up in Chicago, or why the woman had brought him to the room, and the more she talked the more lost he got in the flurry of her French. He looked past her and through the plate glass window of the office, where people were moving along on the street outside, men and women he'd never know walking past him, just as he had anonymously passed by hundreds of windows himself over the last few weeks as he roamed the city streets. He had trouble remembering his own birthday, but he knew when his wandering had begun because it was right after his receiving the news from the states a few weeks earlier that his parents were separating. No, that they had already separated. That was the news. Without the coincidence, it would have seemed to Ryan that he had been walking around the town for months or even years: with no job or classes to attend, time had lost its power to frame its own passing.
The way Ryan figured it, he may as well have been walking forever. At twenty-two, the only direction he had travelled in recently was the circles he made running from net to net on the basketball court and around shelves of stereos and VCR's in the electronics department at the Wal-Mart where he worked in Dayton. His parents had pushed him out of that life and over to France in order to revive -- for the fourth or fifth time -- his impossible trek through college. Or so he had once thought. Recently he had been wondering if they had gotten him out of the way in order to ease their way through their own problems. Leurs problëmes, leur solution.
Ryan was startled out of his daydreaming when the woman tapped the book he was holding. She was saying something about God and the apocalypse and historical truth. As she talked, her eyes looked away on either side of Ryan, just as they had when she had approached him on the street, a fearfulness Ryan had wanted to see more of. Now she kept saying "numèrologiquement." It sounded like something he'd say, Ryan thought, a Frenchified Americanism, to try to make himself understood. The word had something to do with things adding up right, the number of tribes and apostles, the amount of days between events and the people in the universe and the souls in heaven. As he caught more of the words, Ryan realized that the woman was a Hare Krishna or something, trying to convert him or get his money.
"This is a religion?" he asked suddenly.
The woman pushed one of her hands through her dark hair, its black strands arching out over her fingers like tired ferns. After a moment she sat up in the chair. "C'est un type de religion," she said.
"And you want me to buy this book?"
"Yes," she said wearily. "But for a reason."
"To join your religion?"
"To understand it," she said. "Then maybe to join." She tapped the book. "This will explain everything."
Ryan raised and lowered the book in his hands as if weighing it. He saw now that its title was La Lumiëre de nombres. He had a vision of huge neon numerals flashing above an elementary school chalkboard. "Everything about what?" he asked.
For the first time Ryan saw the woman smile. "You don't understand me, do you?" she asked.
"Not always."
"What do you understand?"
"I understand you're very pretty," Ryan said. Speaking in a foreign tongue had given him a cockiness he had never had in English. "You're sexy," he added.
The woman's eyes stayed on him this time, though they didn't show any surprise or anger that Ryan could see. "It's you who should be selling," she said.
Ryan stood up and put the book down on the desk. "You know the Cafè D'Or?" he asked.
"Sit down," she said. "Let me explain again."
"Explain over dinner."
"It's not even time for lunch," she said.
"I'll be there at six o'clock."
The woman half-closed her eyes and stared up at Ryan. He couldn't tell if she was suspicious or bored. "If I come," she said, "I'm going to sell you a book."
He didn't care. These days, he was up for anything. "You can try whatever you want," he said.
***
He didn't think she'd come but she did, her head lowered, whistling or talking to herself as she came toward him waiting in the cafè. Over her shoulder hung a large black purse bulging with what seemed to be the stiff angles of hardcover books. The Cafè D'Or was on a brick pedestrian street that reached from the town's cathedral down to a park near the river, and the woman was coming up toward Ryan from the park, among the other young people starting their evenings and a few working women buying last-minute groceries for home. Ryan had heard that at Easter people lined this street to watch a procession go up from the river to the cathedral, with believers carrying a thirty-foot cross or tossing flowers from the upper windows, with tambourines playing and people on their knees beating their hearts.
The woman seemed lost amid all the other people on the street, even though she was the only one whose purpose Ryan knew. When she spotted him, she came over to his table, and Ryan told the waiter to bring them some white wine. He didn't know the difference between all the kinds of wine and he simply said du vin blanc and hoped it was cheap. Here it would be no problem -- the waiter knew him. The woman sipped at her wine but didn't say anything, glancing around as she had when she tried to talk to Ryan in the office, her eyes unable to settle on anything for long. "So tell me about Arnold Harmon," Ryan finally said.
"Leonard Harmon," the woman said. "And I thought you weren't interested."
"You said you were going to sell me a book."
The woman looked at him with her eyes half-closed again -- wary of him now, Ryan was sure. "His theories are what everybody needs to hear," she said. "His ideas about history and God explain everything. It all adds up."
"Adds up to what?"
"It explains everything," she said. She struggled to find the right words. "It reveals the natural order of the universe," she finally said.
Ryan raised his arms. "Then why am I here?" he asked. "Why am I in this city right now?" It was a question he had asked himself enough times, but so far he had come up with only one response: where else should he be? "Like we say in the states," he said, "what's my place in the big picture?"
"It's not just your picture or mine," the woman said. "It's bigger than that."
"If it explains everything," Ryan said, "and I'm a part of everything, shouldn't it explain me?"
The woman suddenly stood up and grabbed her bag. For a moment Ryan thought he had said a word wrong, that thanks to the horror of his accent he had twisted some French phrase into a crude proposition. "This is no joke," the woman said, and she turned and hurried out of the cafè.
Ryan had a hard time getting out to catch her, even with her heavy purse slowing her down, but he knew he had to explain himself. He couldn't figure out how much he owed for the drinks or how much to leave for a tip, and by the time he threw some francs down on the table and hurried onto the street, the woman had almost fallen out of sight on her way back toward the river. She must have known it was him when he grabbed her arm and turned her around because she didn't scream out or swing at him. She was crying, though without making any noise. Ryan tried to apologize to her, to say that he admired that at least she believed in something, even if he couldn't understand what she was talking about. Better than nothing, wasn't it? But with his poor French he couldn't get out what he wanted to say, whatever meager skills he had collapsing on him anyway as he saw how upset she was. "But no," he said instead, "Mais non, mais non." He dried her face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. "No, no, no," he kept saying, wincing at how stupid he sounded. "You don't understand." He grabbed her shoulders and shook her lightly and then out of desperation pulled her against his chest. To his surprise she didn't pull back. Under the faintly dank odor of her hair he smelled baby powder and the mint of toothpaste. Her body against his felt like a rabbit's, startling in its warmth and brittleness. Finally he stopped trying to talk, and soon the woman raised her arms and held onto the edges of his sleeves.
***
Four weeks before running into Dominique, as Ryan learned her name to be, he received the news of his parents' separation. "It's an experiment," his father had written, though Ryan remembered that in high school, when an experiment failed, you always redid it. He wondered -- do you redo families? When he read the letter, Ryan tried to consider that his parents had lasted twenty-four years, two more than him. And the distance, the numbing breadth of the Atlantic, made the news seem unreal, existing out there somewhere in the vague haze in the west the horizon fell into. But Ryan also couldn't believe that his familiar world back in Dayton could have gone on so differently for so long without the changes touching him at all. And when the letter arrived, his parents had been separated for five months -- why had they waited to tell him? He imagined his parents' bridge club friends had tired of gossiping about the break-up weeks before he even knew about it. When he had asked, his father had simply said that they didn't want anything to ruin Ryan's return to school.
The morning after he read the letter, Ryan woke on his own with the first sign of the sun, at five or five-thirty, long before he usually got out of bed and rushed off to classes. He was startled by how alert he felt. As he got dressed, he thought that something else was going to be different that day too, but he didn't know for sure what it was until he headed toward the university where he was studying for the year and walked by it and into town. He hadn't been back since. So much for his return to school. He had found such an intricacy to the city -- so much that he had missed while going to school or following his guide books through Rome or taking bus tours of the chateaux -- that he woke up every day after his father's letter and went walking again. Dr. Armstrong, the director of the American students, had come to call him the little American nomad, and his parents were beginning to think he was losing a grip on himself by spending his days roaming the city. But on his own he had visited the local cathedral, slipping into an off-limits stairway and finding in a storeroom upstairs sculpted gargoyles that had been mysteriously lopped from the church façades, their stone faces over which he traced his fingers snarling and laughing at each other in the darkness. And he had found an unmarked tunnel about the size of a small bus running under the canal and had crossed through it, though what it was for he had never found out. Over the weeks, he had made friends with a local priest too, who confided to Ryan that he said prayers with his dog kneeling beside him, and he had also gotten to know many of the shopkeepers by name. They told him days ahead of time when they were going to have a special sale or receive a new book or CD that they thought Ryan might like. Ryan returned the favors when he could -- he showed the man who ran the electronics store the best levels at which to set his stereos and amps and equalizers, a talent he had mastered at the Wal-Mart, and he helped the ladies in the hair salon reprogram their VCR each week after one of them would take it home to use on Sunday. Free haircuts for that favor.
And there was Dominique too, complete with her book and her ideas and the life she let Ryan in on bit by bit, a story it seemed she intended to keep in pieces -- her father dying, young, her alcoholic mother, a kind but nameless aunt somewhere, her finally running away from home. "But let's not worry about that," she said after each story. On her own in Paris, she was undressing in a room with a man willing to pay until the man took off his pants and Dominique had run out of the room, forgetting her bra and her purse in her terror. Why right then, Ryan wondered -- why the shock at the man naked and not herself? Some of Harmon's followers found her and took her into a shelter they ran. It was how she had come to be with them. "But let's not worry about that," she said after that story too.
A few weeks after he had met her, Ryan was up at sunrise in Dominique's dark studio, as he had been the other mornings in his own room. The Harmon people rented the room, part of the deal for Dominique working as one of them. Across her only window she had nailed a navy blue curtain, and Ryan saw when he opened his eyes slivers of the early sun coming through the space between the curtain and the wall. He wanted to get walking but couldn't figure out how he should leave. He got up and went to the window and pulled the curtain back far enough to peer outside. A man was pushing a garbage can connected to two big bicycle wheels through the alley outside the window, a push broom standing upside down beside the can. When Ryan turned back from the window, Dominique was awake and looking at him as she lay on the floor on the pile of sheets and spreads she used for a bed. She had the covers up to her neck, her bare arms holding onto her pillow behind her head. "What time do you work?" Ryan asked her.
"I have to sell seven books a day," she said. "I work to do that."
He came over and sat on the floor beside her. "How long does that take?"
"I've never sold more than two or three since I moved here," she said. "Sometimes none."
"But they don't fire you?"
"From a religion?" Dominique threw the covers back and pulled Ryan down by the arm and covered him up. "I want to stay here this morning," she said. She put her arm across his chest, her leg slipping over his, and Ryan closed his eyes to wait.
He was surprised when he awoke later that he had fallen asleep. He started to roll off the bed and then remembered he was already on the floor. Dominique had left. In a thermos in the kitchenette he found some warm coffee, and he drank it standing up out of a bowl he found in the sink and rinsed out. The room had a toilet but no shower that he could see, so he washed himself from the sink tap and got dressed. He thought he'd go see Armstrong to get the school part of his life in France wrapped up by officially withdrawing. He wanted to step out, not fade away. On his way out of the apartment he found a note taped to the door -- "The door will lock behind you. I will be here again this evening if you like." He started to write that he'd be back but then stopped. What if he changed his mind? He couldn't brag about himself, but he did keep his word. "Thanks," he wrote.
***
The office for the program for the American students at the university was on the third floor of one of the classroom buildings, and when Ryan announced to the secretary that he wanted to see Dr. Armstrong, she ushered him into the office right away. Armstrong was tall and heavy, an old linebacker thirty years off the field, but he had a habit of leaning over to speak with people, as if always in the process of collapsing. Ryan had heard that his wife had just divorced him. One of the American girls in the group said the man had sobbed on her shoulder one afternoon, crying over the end of his marriage.
Armstrong was standing by a bulletin board, pretending to adjust a notice on it, when Ryan came in to the office. The secretary shut the door behind her as she left, and Armstrong turned around and sat down at his desk and motioned for Ryan to sit too. "You're putting me in an awkward situation, you know," Armstrong said. "I know you're alive because the other students tell me they see you, but you don't return my phone calls."
"I don't mean to be rude," Ryan said.
"Rude? That's not rude. You're young. You don't care. That's great, in a way." Armstrong picked up a pencil from his desk and began tapping it against his forehead. "It's not dropping you from the program that's a problem. It's pretty obvious you don't care and it's just a technical question."
"I wouldn't say that I don't care," Ryan said.
"Right. Bad choice of words," Armstrong said. "In any event, the university still owes you your monthly stipend. At least until May." He pointed the pencil he had been holding at Ryan. "I guess that's why you're here."
Ryan said it was, but that there were other reasons too. He told Armstrong that he wanted to withdraw officially from the university and that he wanted to make sure he could get his plane ticket for the flight back like everybody else would. The round-trip ticket, part of the program price, was good for several more months. Armstrong told him there was no problem -- the ticket would be waiting for him when he wanted to pick it up.
"Did you know I dropped out of college when I was about your age?" Armstrong said. "I didn't regret it. I'm glad I did it." He was pressing his pencil against his cheek now, twisting it as if adjusting the horizontal on a television. "That's not advice, by the way," he said. "But it helped me get myself together, to get my life in some kind of order."
"Maybe it will work for me too," Ryan said.
Armstrong spread his hands out, palms up. "Now look at me," he said.
"Looks like it worked," Ryan said, and he stood up to go.
Armstrong stood up too. "I talked to your father," he said. "You should keep him informed of where you are. And your mother too, of course."
"I write to them," Ryan said.
"He told me about himself and your mom. About what's going on. Call them. Keep in touch."
"He told me too," Ryan said, and he stepped backwards and out of the room, shutting the door as Armstrong pretended to study something on his desk. Ryan went to the secretary to arrange for his money and ticket, and then headed back downtown to walk.
***
The thick glass and worn wood frames of the phone booth Ryan was in made him think of earlier times, of the wars that had gone on in the country, brown-suited Frenchman making calls as uniformed Germans walked by, loud in their boots. Were the booths that old? If not, they still didn't seem the right place for him to be pressing the buttons for his cross-Atlantic satellite connection. In his confusion he felt he was in some uncertain moment between the 1940's and now, a moment that never really existed and that was his alone.
The last time Ryan had talked to either of his parents was several weeks earlier, just before he had met with Armstrong, when his father had called on a Tuesday night and Ryan had happened to be home. Now he was trying to reach his mother. Her turn to talk to him this time. Dominique stood beside him in the booth as he put in his card for the call, and she watched him intently, her arms about his waist. She slept like that too, close to him, her limbs tangled through his own, and walked with her arms circling his waist, the two of them stumbling about like circus clowns. It annoyed him, but if he wanted to be with her he had to put up with their tripping their way through walking and sleeping together. Ryan had returned to her studio after the first night after all and had stayed with her after that for three nights in a row, and then he decided that he'd better stop before it became a habit. But for the next two weeks he found himself wandering toward her place as the evening ended. Eventually the family in whose house he was staying asked him to leave. They had young daughters, they said, girls who didn't need to see what was going on. Dominique had told him that her room was all she had and that she had no money but that he was welcome to move in.
With Dominique in the booth there wasn't room for Ryan to turn around, and he looked right at her as the hiss in the receiver was broken by a click and then the ringing of the phone and finally the sound of his mother's sleepy voice. "I have a new address," Ryan told her. He could hear her struggling to sit up in bed -- alone, he thought. She had stayed on at the family house, the one Ryan had lived in all his life, but he had trouble picturing what her bed looked like now and he couldn't remember the room beyond it at all. What had stayed behind with her? "My new place doesn't have a phone," Ryan said to her.
"What if something happens? What if there's an emergency?"
"Send a wire," he said.
"We're worried about you," she said. "Your father and I."
"How is Dad?" Ryan asked.
"He's alright, I guess," his mother said. "I don't really know if I can say though. It's tough on both of us."
Ryan didn't want to pursue where his mother's conversation was going, so he asked about friends of his and about uncles and aunts and cousins whose connection to him he couldn't always explain. They were fine, his mother said. They had gout. They were marrying and getting jobs and having their lawns landscaped. Really, Ryan would say. Or, good for her, whoever the cousin was who was graduating from high school. As he talked, he saw that Dominique couldn't understand what he was saying: so here he was carrying on a conversation with a machine while a human being stood by unable to understand him. He began rubbing his hand up and down Dominique's back and squeezed his eyes shut to concentrate on his phone conversation, trying again to picture the scene on the other end of the line. But now he had lost a sense of the shape of the entire inside of his house, and all he could envision was the dull yellow aluminum siding of the façades. He was glad when he and his mother were finally saying goodbye. Before hanging up, he asked her to give his address to his father.
"I'll give it to him," she said, and then added, "You know we both want the best for you."
When Ryan had finished talking, Dominique opened the phone booth doors and the two of them stumbled out into the post office lobby, laughing at the sudden freedom after being confined in the booth. A security guard looked over crossly at them but they held hands and walked out into the afternoon sun. Ryan said he'd spend the rest of the day looking for a job. "I'll go with you," Dominique said.
"You'll go to your own job," Ryan said. Lately she had been going to work late and leaving early, or coming home to take naps with Ryan in the afternoon or to join him as he walked around the city. She said she wasn't worried, that the Harmon group took care of their own. Hadn't they taken her in when she was at her lowest? Ryan had to believe her. Even now she was payed on commission and had to pay the rent from her salary, but she never sold enough books to pay it and yet still had money and never got evicted either. How the whole Harmon system worked Ryan had never been able to figure out, the church or the faith itself. Dominique had tried to explain them, and Ryan had read parts here and there in some of the nearly twenty books of Harmon's that she had, but the man intuited an infinite web of relations Ryan didn't see even as he read about them, Deuteronomy and water, the number eight and sunshine, the four gospels and the four horsemen and earthquakes in Peru. The man tossed his net into reality and considered whatever he pulled in a worthwhile catch. "You understand this?" Ryan had asked Dominique one night in her apartment.
"I used to believe it a lot," she said.
"I just wanted to know if you understood it," Ryan said. "There's a difference."
"I used to believe it," she said again. "I sold a dozen books a day in Paris." Back then it had all added up to something meaningful for her, but Ryan didn't know what she saw in it now. Maybe inertia kept her at it. The more he asked her about it, the more she refused to answer him. "Let's not talk about it," she always said.
Outside the post office Ryan told her that he might go down to the docks to see if anyone needed a man. Since he wasn't allowed to work in the country, he had to find somebody willing to take the risk of hiring him. A bartender he knew said that there might be something unloading boats at night for shipping companies trying to save on union wages.
"We'll find something," Dominique said.
"I'll find something," Ryan said. He turned her around, facing in the direction of the office where they had first talked. "You go sell some books."
***
One of the men on the wharf told Ryan to come back on Monday night and be ready to work. Ryan could hardly believe it was that easy. The man had told him his name but Ryan quickly forgot it and was afraid to ask him again. He wore a red plastic hat and knee-high green boots, and as he and Ryan talked he'd cast an eye at the men carrying wooden crates off of the small boat behind him. Far beyond him, at another part of the wharf, cranes swung their curious heads to lift the cargo from the large freighters that couldn't fit down the canal. "I'm not sure how much there'll be to do," the man had said, "but be ready to work."
On that Monday Ryan had to walk back and forth along the docks two or three times before he found the man in the hat and boots. He was standing near one of the warehouses, under one of the few night-sensor lights that worked. He told Ryan to follow him and led him to a darkened boat, not much bigger than a private yacht, at the far end of the small craft wharf. The boat had a long front deck with a raised and rectangular storage area with small doorways along its side. The man opened one of the doors and pointed inside. "When the truck comes, you put those boxes in it," he said.
Ryan looked inside and saw crates piled in the hold. "What am I doing?" he asked.
The man ignored him. "Once they're in the truck," he said, "get in and help Lazar deliver them. He'll pay you."
"And same time tomorrow?" Ryan asked.
"Lazar will tell you," the man said. "I pay fair but I can't promise work."
Ryan waited for twenty minutes until he spotted a truck coming toward him along the wharf. It backed up close to the boat and a man stepped out. He introduced himself as Lazar and gave Ryan a cigarette. "When you're done, honk the horn twice. I'll hear you," he said, and then he headed through the mist and into one of the warehouses.
The crates were all different in size and shape, square and rectangular, some Ryan could carry in one arm they were so light and others he had to drag. It was as if someone had scavenged among the other boats for all the discarded or forgotten boxes. Many of them were scratched with Chinese or Russian words. Others had stencilled on them odd arrangements of numbers and letters -- W1B663C2, US2CH34. Ryan made up meanings for them, trying to match initials with countries and give significance to the numbers -- weights, product codes, dates. The wood of the crates sometimes had holes bored in it but the sides were nailed shut and the hold and the night outside were too dark to let him see inside the cartons.
When he finished, Ryan and Lazar took the truckload to a warehouse across town where other boxes lined the sides of the room. On top of piles of open crates were stacks of china and rows of porcelain banks shaped like monkeys and hundreds of plastic bags filled with colored balls and marbles and jacks. There were rolled-up flags in plastic tubes, jeans, Mason jars and toy swords, fake pewter mugs and cassettes and small rotating fans. Lazar helped Ryan unload the new boxes, and then he drove him back to Dominique's and gave him an envelope with cash in it. "Come back Wednesday night," he said.
Though it was early in the morning, Dominique was awake when Ryan stepped in the door. She was wearing his Ohio State sweatshirt over her panties and sat at the kitchen table, two plates stacked with chocolate chip cookies in front of her. Ryan felt suddenly tense, as if the studio had grown crowded and noisy, pressing in on him. But it was only him and Dominique and the noise of the night city outside the window. "You have to get up early in the morning," Ryan said.
"I made you some American cookies," Dominique said. "I couldn't sleep."
"You didn't have to do that."
"They're to tempt you back."
"I was coming back," Ryan said. It was true, though he hadn't promised it. He sat down at the table and took a bite of one of the cookies. They were good, the price and the award for her attentions. He looked up at her as she sleepily watched him taste the cookies. "Where would I go?" he said.
***
In May, before classes ended for the summer, Ryan went to get his last stipend and his airplane ticket from Armstrong's secretary, but she said that Armstrong insisted on giving the ticket to Ryan personally and she led him into the office. "I promised your folks I'd talk to you," Armstrong said to him. "They tell me you're hard to reach."
"I don't have a phone, but we talk as much as we can," he said. "And we write." Each week he sent one letter headed Dear Mom and Dad, rotating where he mailed it, first to one of them and then the other. He liked saying just enough to let them know something was happening in his life, but he kept out the details, the colors and the taste of his new life, like that he was living with Dominique. When are you coming home? they wrote in return. What are you doing with yourself these days? How about giving me a call? The week before Ryan had read in a letter from his mother that she and his father were thinking of coming over together to visit him. "It will be awkward," she wrote, "but we want to see you."
"It's important to keep communicating with those closest to us," Armstrong said. He looked at Ryan once and then handed him the ticket. "It's not goodbye forever remember," he said, pointing to the ticket. "Don't want to lose your only way back."
At home Ryan put the cash from the stipend in the coffee can under the couch where he and Dominique kept their money, and he put the ticket in a copy of the Harmon book she had first tried to sell him. "His most important," she had said. But Ryan knew now that to Harmon everything was important.
Four or five nights a week Ryan worked on the docks, taking the boxes with Lazar to the warehouse where they were unpacked by other workers, people Ryan never saw. He went to bed early in the morning, sometimes after dawn, and woke to have coffee and toast or some of the cookies Dominique baked. It was all he ate until she came home in the evening with some fish or salad or fruit. His walks through town were growing less frequent--after a night of lifting crates he only wanted to lie on the couch or to stretch his muscles and get ready for another night. Each morning he soaked his hands in a sink of warm water, wincing at the dozens of tiny points of pain along the pink filaments of raw scratches on his skin. Dominique said that it wasn't fair that she got to sit all day while he hurt himself working for small wages through the night. "You better not be sitting all day," Ryan told her.
One morning Ryan woke up later than usual and saw Dominique sitting on the couch, her back to him as she read a magazine. He saw her body stiffen as he sat up. "My guess is that this isn't a vacation day," Ryan said.
Dominique turned around to face him. "I hadn't quit before because I was afraid to," she said.
"But what about Harmon and the church? All that stuff you believe in?"
"I'm looking at other things now," she said.
Ryan laid back down. They'd have to move, that was for sure, and the money he earned would barely pay the rent. He remembered his airplane ticket, stuck in the middle of one of Dominique's Harmon books. Dayton was a decision and a plane ride away. "We'll have to find you a job," he said.
"I'm going to work with you."
"I don't think so," he said.
Dominique looked for a few days, applying for sales positions or something as a secretary, but then she said that she had tried enough and was going to work with him. What could he say? He tried to convince her not to come, but he didn't want to tell her why. A week earlier the man in the hat had seen him trying to look into one of the boxes and had grabbed him by the shoulder and thrown him against a wall. "You lift and you get payed," the man had said. "And that's it." When he brought Dominique to the docks that night, Lazar didn't want her working there either until Ryan convinced him that he'd get two for the price of one -- two workers, same pay, faster job. "Can't get a better deal than that," Ryan said.
Once he and Dominique started working, Ryan found that he liked having her waiting inside the hold of the boat when he came back from the truck for another crate. It had always been eerie working at night alone, with it so cold and wet all the time, and in such an odd place as the wharf, a slab of concrete at the edge of the earth. At first it had been a nice change from Dominique's constant attention, a way to be by himself, goodbye to everybody and everything for a while, but that had been getting old the last few weeks.
One time when he returned from putting a crate into the truck, Ryan found Dominique standing up by an open box in the hold, her hands to her mouth. The side of the carton she had opened lay on the floor, the packing straw spread over it. Ryan saw something jumping about on the ground not far from the lid, and then something else identical to it lying motionless in the hay. They were shaped like bowling pins, only they were brightly colored and the one that jumped made hissing sounds like a snake.
"Parrots," Dominique said.
As he stepped closer, Ryan saw that other parrots were walking around dazed on the floor, bumping into each other and the boxes around them. The one lying in the hay was dead. Another stood by the crate with its wings tied to its body and a small hood over its head. Ryan peered into the box and saw a few more birds, some of them moving slowly and others motionless. So odd was their sight that for a moment he thought they were a curse on him or a hallucination that had turned real. He looked at Dominique as if she were to blame for the vision, but his look didn't last long once she stooped to pick up the bird standing outside the box and began to untie it. As she worked at the knot on the string, Ryan reached in and pulled out the other birds and untied the living ones, standing them together by the crate door. They wandered away as quickly as he got them assembled together, and finally he watched them scatter in all directions at his feet. "We have to go," he said to Dominique.
She pointed to the boxes left in the hold. "What's in the others?" she asked.
"We don't care," Ryan said.
"Let's take the birds."
"Don't be ridiculous," he said. He pulled her after him and out of the hold, but once they were on the wharf he went back into the boat and grabbed one of the birds and came back out again.
"Let me carry it," Dominique said. He put it into her hands, and the parrot twisted its head and made short, gruff gasps as they ran down the wharf and into the street.
***
The way Ryan figured it, they had enough money for six weeks, if they were careful. It got them to Angers, where they decided to go to try their luck for a while and to avoid Lazar and the man in the hat. They found a new place to live close to the old chateau, a corner room with the doorways and walls moving off unevenly from their junctions and a view of the slow, grey river and the black hulk of the chateau. So this was where he was headed, Ryan thought, when he had walked past the university that one day. It seemed as good a place as any he could imagine being. For two days he and Dominique toured the city and walked along the river, and then they started hunting for jobs. Most of the shopkeepers listened politely but said they couldn't hire anybody, especially not Ryan. "On ne peut pas," they said. It wasn't personal, they meant to say, but they had to be careful about foreigners. There were laws.
After a few days Ryan gave up, staying at home while Dominique went out to look for work by herself. They talked of trying Paris instead, where somebody like Ryan could better get lost in the chaos of the big city. All he knew was he didn't want to head back home. Despite his panic when Dominique quit her job, he couldn't imagine going back. He looked forward to the expiration date on his ticket, when his leaving would be out of his hands. The house in Ohio, the Wal-Mart, those were parts of his past, and his past had now come to resemble what his future had always seemed to him, both of them like those stars you see exploding in the public-television science shows, the comfortable pattern of particles in a sphere instantly and hopelessly scattered across space: Ryan didn't have the energy to try to put it all back together. What for after all? He had even been tempted not to tell his parents his new address in Angers. Let them see what it's like to live in ignorance for a while.
During the day, while waiting for Dominique, Ryan fed the parrot pieces of cookies and read through the two Harmon books he and Dominique had brought with them. He grew fascinated by the connections the man could dream up, the way he could see things where Ryan himself saw nothing. The bird watched him read and huffed at Ryan to feed him -- someone had poured lye down its throat or had sliced its vocal chords -- even though it had its own bowl filled with food. It spent its days on the floor, hopping onto the shoeboxes and coffee cans that Ryan and Dominique had put there for it to play with.
One evening Dominique came in late, carrying some cheese and a baguette and a bottle of wine. "I found us a job," she said. She had asked about it a week earlier but hadn't said anything until the job was theirs for sure. "We start tonight," she said.
"We?" Ryan asked
"I told them you were my husband and I filled out the papers for both of us." She wouldn't tell him what it was. It was a surprise, she said. After dinner she put the dishes in the sink and put some seed in the bird's bowl, and then she took Ryan to a narrow street in the middle of the city. All the shops were locked up and dark, but she led him down some rusting iron steps behind an old brick building and opened a door onto a kitchen, a bakery. Warm air, moist with the odor of yeast, puffed up and around them. A black man was inside, dressed all in white, and he was writing something on a piece of paper. He shook Ryan's hand and showed him around the room. He pointed out the ovens, hissing and clicking from their heat, and three large preparation tables anchored to the floor with metal braces and covered with black and white tops as solid and hard as marble. Flour coated everything -- ovens, walls, utensils, paper -- a fine and endless snow that made the air tight and heavy to breathe.
The man explained that Ryan and Dominique were to mix the dough and form it into pastries, then they were to bake what they had made, place the cooked rolls and muffins on trays, and then stack the trays on carts. "I've showed your wife everything already," he said. "I'm sure the two of you can figure it out." On the wall the man hung the orders they had to fill that night. "You have to finish by four because the trucks come to collect the orders at four-thirty," he said. "If you don't finish on time, you don't get payed and you can't come back."
When the man had left, Ryan turned to Dominique. "So you're my wife," he said.
"You've also had two years experience at night baking."
"I have no idea how to bake," he said.
"Follow the directions," she said. She showed Ryan papers sealed in plastic and hanging from a short chain from one of the tables. "The recipes," she said.
After they put on their aprons, Dominique read the recipes out loud and taught Ryan the tricks she had picked up while working with the man earlier in the day. "It's as easy as can be," she said. You had to choose the proper dough mix, shape it in the right way, and then add the chocolate or the cheese or the fruit. Then you put what you made in the oven at the right temperature for a certain amount of time until all the orders were completed. It was simple, Dominique said -- applied mathematics. Add the ingredients, follow the directions, fill the orders.
Simple for her wasn't simple for him, but Ryan couldn't complain. He and Dominique started out slowly, turning a batch of dough to paste once and soon after burning a rack of rolls, both thanks to Ryan. But after three or four hours the carts started to fill up with the trays of cakes and muffins and pies they had done right. At Wal-Mart the one thing Ryan had mastered was getting the new stereo models on the shelves set at their best volume and frequency, or the miniature televisions at their best reception before they had cable, even the cheap models not worth the cardboard they were packed in. But his satisfaction had always vanished when he heard the voice from the p.a. system paging someone or when a customer would ask him where television cables were or, worse, would fiddle with the dials on the models -- his little success quickly got sucked back into the bigger chaos of the store. He was glad to be working alone now with Dominique, buried in a basement and bothered only by an occasional student looking to buy fresh rolls. Ryan sold them what they wanted and gave them change from a cigar box kept by the door and then sent them on their way. Their world was his too, but he couldn't help feeling as he wished them a good night like the shopkeepers who had looked after him.
While letting out one of the students, Ryan looked up through the rectangular opening at the top of the metal stairs to see the clear night with its stars and the clouds dusting by them. He knew from a recent letter that coming toward him from a future sky was the plane that would be carrying his parents, that two-headed monster eating at itself. He felt bad he had thought of hiding out from them. Let them come. They should meet Dominique. And the parrot could use more friends. There'd be a plane going back too, Ryan knew, but he wouldn't be on it.
Ryan waved at the imaginary plane returning without him and stepped back inside the bakery, locking the door behind him. Across the room Dominique was rolling dough into a long strand and then cut it into pieces. She picked up two of the pieces and started to weave them in and out of each other, quickly, as if she had been doing it for years. Flour had settled in her hair and along the arms of her sweatshirt, and her face was flushed pink from the heat of the ovens. For a moment Ryan thought he had seen her the same way before, a tableau of dèja vu, but maybe it had just been a glimpse of her earlier in the night that he was thinking of.
Ryan went back to his own table and pulled up a handful of dough and started to shape it into a ball for kneading. Behind him were the dozens of trays of food he and Dominique had prepared, lined up in neat rows on the carts. In a few more hours the orders would be filled. Ryan himself was finishing up the cinnamon buns, something he had taken charge of once he figured out how to make them. His tenth and last tray of them sat half-filled on the edge of his work table. When he finished with them, he'd have to learn how to do something else. He was hoping Dominique would show him how to make the braided rolls she was working on, but he didn't know if they needed to make any more of them. Still shaping the ball of dough in his hands, he went over to the wall to look at the order sheets to find out, to see how much they had already done and what more they had to do. Maybe he could learn how to do the braided rolls tonight, or maybe he would have to wait until tomorrow.
(top)

An essay by Peter Chilson

"There he is," Issoufou Garba says, gazing out the car windshield into gritty haze. "There's my little imbecile. Do you see him?"

"Non," I say. I don't see him, the man Issoufou calls, "mon petit imbecile." For some reason the words seem clearer in the original French, as if my memory of the man we sought is now frozen in the phonetics. An ice cube of thought. In French, the three syllables of "imbecile" bounce louder from the lips; and they can be drawn out, emphasized with a sharp kick of the tongue at the end. Iimmbeecciila. Which is what Issoufou is doing, drawling the word to himself as he watches whomever it is I can't see--a komasho, a free lance bush taxi ticket agent who sells passengers to taxi drivers like Issoufou.

I look at him. "Where is he, Issouf?"

I squint and lean over on the seat, looking past Issoufou. He frowns at me, a little impatient, and points again at someone, casually flicking his left hand behind him with the index finger out, the way one might point out the village idiot. "Tu vois? C'est lui, la. Issoufou laughs just a little, nodding his head slightly, suggesting he has made eye contact with this person. He turns off the engine.

We are sitting in Issoufou's Peugeot station wagon, on a road just outside a crowded motor park, two vast fields separated by a long, low cement wall in the center of Maradi, a border city in Niger, West Africa. On the broad Niger-Nigeria frontier, Maradi is economically more complex, bigger, dirtier, wealthier, more dangerous than Niger's other cities. An African Tijuana. You can buy anything: Snickers bars, genuine or fake Jordache jeans, baseball gloves (no one plays in Niger), automatic arms, whatever. The stuff comes up from Nigeria, that African catch-all Goliath.

In that street, dense streams of people--women and girls balancing pots of rice and beans atop their heads, people on market business, people with no business, children, travelers, idlers--drift and collect, this way and that, congealing at shops, in the shade of trees, at coffee tables. The street is so crowded, the din of voices and engines and animals so constant, that I can't tell whom Issoufou is pointing at.

I am in Niger to study motor transport in a desperately poor region. For four months I've been riding with Issoufou Garba, a smuggler, merchant, and bush taxi driver who operates from his home base in Zinder, 160 miles east of Maradi in southeastern Niger. Early that morning, the gendarmes at the city entrance hadn't bothered with us. I don't know why. As we arrived at the checkpoint, a soldier, clutching himself against the cool February Harmattan wind--it blows hard to the south off the Sahara from October to March--simply lowered the rope and waved us on. Four other soldiers huddled around the driver of a large 18-wheel truck. Bigger prey, maybe, but small consolation to us.

Around 1 p.m., we find ourselves back among the komasho, a dozen young men and boys who right away seem to sense our nervousness and close in. They pound on the windows, they thump the roof, they shout. "Monsieur Issouf, c'est moi! Tu me connais, tu me connais, c'est moi!"

Now, just ahead of us, I see a man who looks a little evil. It is, I suppose, his face. He coasts briskly along my side of the car at the head of a group of four men, like pirates preparing to board and loot. The evil one, the leader, is short, overly muscular, slightly stooped, frowning from a lumpy face, like a troll. A Maradi komasho.

His name is Abdou, and, as I later understand, he is one of Issoufou's komasho contacts. I've never met him before, though I know enough to be careful. Judging by his appearance, his strength, the newness of his clothing, he seems to do better than most komasho. He stands there with his face in my window, grinning and rapping his knuckles hard on the glass.

Niger, in 1993, seemed eager to shed 17 years of Army rule. After a brain tumor had felled the dictator. After the Army shot to death nine students in the capital streets. After a captain admitted ordering the murder of 100 Tuareg men, women and children in the north, and defied government attempts to arrest him. After 25 years of drought and the population doubled to eight million. The country wavered on democracy's edge, flirting with new liberties, or new oppressions.

Madness, in brief flashes, framed life. The economy had never been so bad, nor money so scarce. Men built governments and destroyed them. They sat at the steering wheels when buses collided. Men beat men. Men burned cars and buildings. Men decided how women should dress in public, and beat and stoned the defiant ones in the streets. Men set roadblocks, held the guns and clubs. The country, at times, seemed to be at the mercy of male angst, venality, religious fervor. Men framed the limits of sanity, and of madness. They decided who would ride the roads, and who would not.

Abdou, the komasho, wears a heavy, ill fitting brown canvas suit, homespun and brand new. His sandals are blue plastic, a cheap Chinese variety. He has shaved his head and his face is smooth skinned, lean and square, the nose and chin prominent, which together with the high cheekbones and jutting forehead make his visage appear lumpy, like a potato. Thick protruding tendons, like lengths of thick bark, run up his forearms. Then I notice his sunglasses are fashioned for a woman, the top-heavy plastic kind with the bows attached to the bottom of wide oval lens frames. The inside seams of Abdou's trousers wiggle out of control down his thighs, and the cuffs are uneven by an inch. Issoufou's contempt, his use of the word imbecile and the nervous chuckle, come back to mind. But I don't feel like laughing.

Too risky.

All at once, Issoufou leans over and thrusts an arm behind my seat to unlock the rear door. Abdou yanks it open immediately. He slides in the back seat, slams and locks the door against his competitors, who orbit the car, arguing amongst themselves. They peer at us through the windows, some frowning and others waving and smiling at me, while the troll sits behind Issoufou and leans forward to clamp his right hand on my friend's shoulder, still grinning. The grin's persistence carries a psychopathic quality, emphasizing that the hand-on-shoulder is not a gesture of friendship, but more a reminder of the strength of the hand's owner.

One of the men outside the car puts his ear to my window; another does the same on the driver's side. But Issoufou and this komasho ignore all this. They dispense with greetings, going straight to business while Issoufou simultaneously studies the streets, lest one of Abdou's more earnest competitors decide to cause more significant trouble, like say, try to smash a window. The komasho do this occasionally to destroy each other's business contacts.

"I've got two, Issoufou," Abdou says hoarsely, just above a whisper, aware of the ears outside. He ignores me, just another white traveler to him--a tourist, a missionary, a Peace Corps volunteer? It doesn't matter. I am Issoufou's own merchandise, a non-issue. Already sold freight.

The man at my window presses his lips against the glass, then his tongue, flat against the surface, like a pink snail. He backs off a moment, laughing, watching for my reaction. I watch him blankly as he prods me with a wide toothy smile, raising his eyebrows repeatedly. Another man sits calmly on the hood, hunched over in the shape of a gargoyle, his chin on his knees and his legs crossed at the ankles. Others circle the car. I fold my arms, a gesture of defense, of digging in.

Abdou and Issoufou continue talking in low tones. I hear Abdou say: "They weren't easy to find, Issouf. This will cost you."

I remember the actions of many komasho in Niger, in Nigeria and Ivory Coast and Senegal, their bobbing, swirling, biting presence, but not what they all looked like. The details mix in my head: bare feet, sores, ragged dust-stained clothes, mostly trousers and American T-shirts. No faces. This is important: The man at my window suddenly grabs his shirt tail, vigorously wipes the smokey smear of his saliva from the glass where his tongue had been, and promptly walks away. As if he is suddenly sorry. Another man takes his place, kneeling at the window to look at me. This man wears a T-shirt, dirty white. It reads in large green block letters: "Forest Rangers Do It In Trees."

Issoufou asks: "Where are my passengers?" He looks at Abdou now in his rearview mirror and smiles broadly, trying to blend with the komasho's persistent grin and keep the tone calm and easy.

Abdou leans forward, unimpressed, his hand still heavy on Issoufou's shoulder. He drills a glare and an order into Issoufou's ear. "They are coming, Issouf." Abdou slaps the top of the seat, and Issoufou looks at him a moment, and then over at me. Issoufou smiles. "We wait," he says.

Niger has a highway police unit, the Brigade Routiere, a part of the Gendarmerie Nationale. Speed limit signs are posted, but Niger's open roads are unpatrolled, and drivers unchecked for attention to speed and traffic laws. There are only ragtag bands of men at checkpoints, wearing old fatigues and the green berets of gendarmes. The Brigade Routiere.

In a motor park garage, just a parcel of open ground under a tree, I once watched a gendarme sergeant bring in his personal car to have the fuel filter changed, and later drive off without paying, leaving only this promise. "I'll find you if my car breaks down."

In Niamey, Niger's capital, I went one day in early December to meet the brigade commandant but an aide outside his office told me I would have to get permission first. For weeks I was passed along a line of Gendarmerie and Army officers ("I'm sorry, I don't have the authority to talk to you," I was told. "Go see Lieutenant..."), and bounced back and forth between ministries (Defense, Transport, Interior).

One Friday afternoon, after spending a day working my way up three floors of the Gendarmerie Nationale, where I had become a minor fixture, ("Ah, it's you again. Haven't you found the commandant?") I was standing in a small room with a certain lieutenant of gendarmes, a man named Idrissa. He was tall and thin and serious, his head clean shaven, and he wore a dress khaki tunic, trousers, and polished black leather shoes. The room had a desk and chair and Lieutenant Idrissa received me without offering his hand or asking me to sit. I was being interrogated, albeit, half heartedly. We spoke in French.

"What is your research?"

"I'm writing about road transport."

"Why? What is so special about Niger?"

I tried to be cheerful, personable, with my hands folded politely in my lap. "You are said to have the best road system in West Africa," I said. In fact, Niger's roads, built with profits from its Saharan uranium mines, were still among the region's best. "Maybe there is something to be learned from Niger's experience."

He frowned, shook his head. "I doubt it." Then, he said, "Do you have a research authorization?" I smiled, though uneasy, and handed him a copy of the document, which had the Minister of Education's signature. He put the paper on his desk after a glance and looked back at me. "Have you ever been in the military?"

"No." I added a hopeful detail. "I was in the Peace Corps, here in Niger." This did not seem to soften him, as he did not seem to hear me. Then he said, "I'll keep your authorization (it was only a copy). The commandant will see you Monday morning at eight. And he'll want to see a list of your questions before he talks with you."

I wondered that the meeting had been just a formality, that they just didn't know what else to do with me, except give me the interview.

It is noon, the hour for the mid-day prayer. Issoufou has stopped the Peugeot at a small mosque on the edge of Gazaoua, a village that straddles Route One. Mud brick buildings spread and quickly fade out over a thinly forested plain 50 miles east of the city of Maradi, seven miles north of Nigeria, and 360 miles south of Algeria.

As it turned out, Abdou did have the passengers he promised: four men who had been waiting for us at a coffee table a few blocks away. After 30 minutes, Abdou brought them, each carrying a nylon or plastic handbag. Another half hour passed as he and Issoufou, standing beside the car, argued over price. The other komasho had wandered away, looking for more opportunities. Abdou would lean forward into Issoufou's face--"Issouf, I could have sold them to someone else--while the driver stood, arms folded, calmly toeing the dirt, smiling and waiting. Finally, Issoufou paid him 3,000 ($10) CFA francs--500 francs more than Issoufou had first offered, and 500 francs less than what Abdou had first demanded--and we started back to Zinder on an afternoon so windy and hazy, it almost appeared to be snowing.

Now I am standing, while the others pray, on the road, watching sand blow over my boots. I am wearing a gray cotton turban that protects my face and mouth. The sandstorm below my knees is different from the haze that hangs around me: a dust storm, fine gritty fog, light and dense, lifted high in the atmosphere by soft, steady winds.

Sand, not dust, washes around my ankles, blowing southwest in gentle brown streams and creating the illusion that the earth's surface has softened to the texture of cotton. A sandstorm requires meaner winds, 20 miles per hour or more, to move heavier particles in low sheets, usually no higher than chest level. Sandstorms I have seen in the West African Sahel and southern Utah looked sometimes like thin creeks and at other times like broad rivers of hissing sand. These storms are not all benign. Sandstorms can quickly build deep drifts and small dunes. They occasionally bury stranded cars, even abandoned villages. The storm at my feet, though, moves mildly.

Issoufou, a religious and conscientious man, likes to stop in Gazaoua, a few kilometers west of a government checkpoint at the town of Tessaoua. And now, watching him finish his prayers, a kerchief tied around his face from the nose down, it occurs to me that he makes this stop to prepare himself. He swears the gendarmes at Tessaoua hate bush taxi drivers, resent their freedom, the money they make. Issoufou rarely reveals nervousness, but I see it as he repeatedly dries his hands on the breast of his blue cotton tunic.

Issoufou Garba is not a physically intimidating man. He has a short, pudgy frame and, to protect his eyes against sand, wears battered clear-lens aviator-style eye glasses set crookedly on the end of his nose. The glasses give him a goofy look, yet he projects casual control, as if nothing matters. Not time, not money. The sort of cool that reins in another man's anger.

I once saw a drunken soldier draw his pistol on Issoufou, who had refused to pay a checkpoint bribe. Issoufou won that battle, unharmed, through quiet stubbornness--that folded-arms-toeing-the-dirt pose he seems able to hold indefinitely.

Issoufou works in a world which demands cool heads. Hungry, sometimes drunken, and often unpaid soldiers and paramilitary types patrol Niger's roads. Some 40 checkpoints strap the roads down, while angry, and often drunken young men (Issoufou excepted. He doesn't drink at all) drive the wheels of commercial transport: small bush taxis, passenger coaches, big trucks. A rumor I'd heard many times in motor parks claimed the Tessaoua soldiers had in the past year beaten to death a bush taxi driver who was making the trip east from Niamey at night. I could never confirm the story.

Still, among drivers the rumor survives on fresh details of other offenses, a sort of indirect evidence. I have collected my own such corroboration. I saw a soldier inexplicably beat a young woman at one checkpoint, and at others I have watched soldiers yank women and children off buses for lack of identity cards. I have seen three drivers badly beaten for not having "proper registration papers." I was present two months before when the Tessaoua gendarmes kept Issoufou's car documents for two hours without explanation. They took all passenger papers, including my passport. The gendarmes ignored Issoufou's inquiries and themselves asked nothing. As we waited, they sat and played cards beside the documents, which they had stacked on a bench.

A simple demonstration of power.

After they gave back our papers, Issoufou returned to the car in quiet rage that barely broke the crust of his personality. He spit his words as he started the engine: "Those soldiers, without these roads they would have nothing to do. Nothing!"

That comment stays with me, surfacing every time we pass a checkpoint. I think of it now, turning to face the car, where Issoufou is folding his prayer rug.

At the rural Niger high school where I was a Peace Corps English teacher (1985-87), the headmaster would receive a telegram announcing a Ministry of Education inspection. On the appointed day a deputy minister would come up the dirt road from Route One (36 miles south of the village) in a fleet of three Land-Rovers, one holding a couple of soldiers. The official would cancel classes and call a staff meeting to explain a vaccination program, discuss test scores and so on. The soldiers patrolled the grounds. The minister himself came once, bringing a light tank which crouched outside during the staff meeting. A more powerful means of communication than a memo, or fuzzy phone call.

In Niger, bureaucrats are poorly trained and underpaid. Telephones work barely, electricity is unreliable or nonexistent, and computers impractical. Few see television. Most people have a radio, but its voice is a distant, disembodied, suspect presence.

So there is the road: a manual means to execute policy, provide services and remind the population of a central authority. Roads are the most consistent evidence of government in Niger. District capitals, of course, straddle important motor roads, which also coincide with secondary schools, major medical services, and most large markets. Primary schools, medical dispensaries, agricultural services, are only thinly sprinkled in bush villages. Government sends officials on tournee to collect information, explain policy, and be seen. An imperfect, inefficient ruling method, but workable and cheap in a country where civil servants are owed five months back pay, and foreign donors provide half the $300 million national budget.

Show of strength is key. Niger's security forces number 2,000 and most serve on roads, a tremendous expense. Extortion (what diplomats call "informal taxation") helps pay for it--in Niger and across the continent. In March 1995, Howard French of the New York Times wrote, in a story about West Africa's economic malaise, of a trip between the capitals of Burkina Faso and Ghana.

On one recent 600-mile drive from Ouagadou-

gou to Accra, there were no fewer than 30 pol-

ice and customs checks. Those who brave the

route...say they are routinely held up for bribes

or forced at each stop to surrender portions of

their belongings.

The checkpoint is an African road institution, analogous to the American speed trap, where travelers expect to do battle. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's 1987 novel, Anthills of the Savannah, climaxes in violence at a checkpoint on a fictional African country's "Great North Road." "Security forces!" the narrative scoffs. "Who or what are they securing?" In that tragic scene, a character challenges a drunken soldier:

He [the soldier] unslung his gun, cocked

it, narrowed his eyes while confused voices

went up all around...Chris stood his ground

looking straight into the man's face, daring

him to shoot. And he did, point blank...

Such scenarios breed easily. In Niger it is a crime to live without a national identity card, a law enforced by checking road travelers, which provides soldiers with endless opportunity for mischief. The penalty for not producing the card is loss of travel rights, jail and a 500-franc (85 cents) fine, which few can pay. Identity cards provide information for a running census on population size, where people live, what they do, and most importantly, what ethnic group they belong to. The information is valuable for organizing services, such as estimating and providing food needs during famine, and for just keeping tabs on people.

In the United States, we keep vast data networks for these purposes: tax and driver records; criminal, bank, telephone, school, social security, birth, automobile, and health records; military draft registrations; credit histories; newspaper subscriptions; library cards. Get stopped for speeding, and in seconds the cop calls up your history on a computer attached to the dash, or he radios the station to do it for him. Apply for an apartment, and your credit must be checked first in a computer data bank.

In Niger, however, the government doesn't know you exist--no one but those in your family, village or neighborhood do--unless you get snagged at a road checkpoint or need to, say, apply for food aid at a district capital, on a road of course.

Issoufou keeps an easy pace during the short drive to Tessaoua. We merge with thin dust that quickly becomes even more dense than we had seen in Maradi early that morning. It coats my teeth, tongue, gums. Impressed by the dust's thoroughness, I wrap the turban tighter around my head.

In 20 minutes we are in the market town and district capital of Tessaoua. Mud houses blend with the dust, like a world dipped in dirty skim milk. We roll easily through empty streets, passing no checkpoint. We slow to a crawl past the town center until we begin to emerge on the east side of town, near the checkpoint we know waits meters ahead. Just a crude rope hung low across the road, and a cement guard hut. We are looking for it, hoping we don't overrun the rope and anger the gendarmes.

"The gendarme lives the problems of the road." I was sitting, courtesy of Lieutenant Idrissa, on the appointed Monday morning in the office of Moctar Saley, commandant of the Brigade Routiere. He was telling me what I thought he would. "[The gendarme] understands the problems of the road. He is honest and very well trained."

Saley's office felt like a large closet. He worked there in the brigade's one-story cement administrative building inside a gendarmerie training compound in Niamey. There was a small window, a broken electric ceiling fan, and walls covered with the narrow, brown dribble of rainy season roof leaks. Commandant Saley sat behind a metal desk, clear of paperwork, wearing clean pressed camouflage fatigues and sandals. He was in his 40's, balding, very straight in his chair, trim, but startlingly soft-spoken. A career soldier. Behind the desk hung a very bad watercolor portrait of him in khaki uniform poised at that desk with pen in hand, over paperwork.

I had been handed, by everyone along the chain of command, a good many generalities about Moctar Saley. Scrupulously honest. A man of impressive reserve and control. A devout Moslem, husband, father of eight. A former Brigade Routiere garrison commander in five of Niger's regional departments, and now, for four years, he has been overall brigade commandant. "Yes, a very good man," said a man I knew in the national drivers' union. "But we think he is not very aware of reality on the road. It is a question of isolation. Commandant Saley has done his time in the field, and now he stays in Niamey."

When I arrived in Saley's office, he was cordial, rising to offer me his hand across the desk. He asked to see a written list of my questions, which I produced. He studied them silently while I waited, watching a boy in ragged shorts and T-shirt sit in the doorway polishing the commandant's boots with spittle and a dirty rag. Saley smiled and handed the list back to me, leaning forward and clasping his hands atop his desk. He said, Bon, alors?

I sat in a bare metal chair with my notebook on my lap. "What are the most serious problems you find on Niger's roads," I began, softly, testing his responses. Another question: "Are road conditions safer now than when you joined the brigade?" I looked for an opportunity to insert, casually, a question not on the submitted list, but which interested me most: I wanted to ask him about corruption and indiscipline within the brigade.

"The national highways are exposed to excessive speed and driver impudence," he said, leaning on his elbows, his arms folded now, looking straight at me. Saley did not gesture when he spoke, or seem to alter his tone, as if he felt his words needed no help to be understood. "Many drivers are completely untrained and neglect the mechanical needs of their cars and the safety of their passengers. They collect the fare and drive until their cars fall apart."

Saley's answers came like this for 20 minutes-- predictable, narrow, passive, no casual straying from the subject. A lecture. I was becoming restless and nervous. I said "but," and he raised his hand to stop me. When he finished a response, he said, Bon, question trois? and later, Alors, question quatre? "Yes," I said, late in the interview, ignoring the next listed question, "but why do you think drivers are like this, so seemingly irresponsible, as you put it."

"They are just greedy," he said. "Drivers are not well educated or honest people. They don't take care of their cars."

The statement startled me. I thought of mechanics in their open-air "garages," repairing police vehicles under threat, and the bush taxis that come for repairs. Often the taxis are pushed in by passengers and the cash-poor driver, who promises the mechanic that he will pay what he can when he can. In Niger, the car market works almost entirely on second-hand vehicles from Europe, and they are repaired with parts recycled or refashioned over and again. Mechanics work like battlefield surgeons of a kind--trained in inadequate facilities and rushed to the front. They are few and poorly equipped. They live lives of periodic idleness and frenzy. Curled up on an oily mat one moment, maybe a whole day, and then buzzing about prioritizing the wounded, going without rest, food. Sleep and triage. They work with what they have, tools and parts strewn about in oil-stained dirt, amidst stripped auto carcasses, compact cars and minibuses, scattered here and there, twisted and empty like dried orange rinds.

I looked up from my notes and smiled.

"Yes," I said, "but don't you think there are similar problems of greed and corruption at your checkpoints? You must be aware, commandant, that drivers are always complaining of how gendarmes take money from them at checkpoints, even from passengers, and often without explanation or reason...I've seen this myself." I heard my own voice letting the question get out of hand, more to the point than I had planned, breaking the seal of the interview. "I understand there is even an occasional beating."

For a moment, Saley stared at me, unblinking, like an actor who had been fed a line not in the script. But only for a moment.

"I have never heard of this happening, and I don't know what you saw." he said. "All behavior found to be unbecoming of a gendarme in the brigade is severely sanctioned. That I can assure you." The last sentence, Saley spoke slowly, pausing briefly between each word, and rising to his feet as he finished.

Without looking up from my notebook, pretending not to see him, I asked, "Can you give me an example of when you have disciplined a gendarme?" I looked up when the commandant did not answer.

He said, C'est fini, monsieur.

Issoufou suddenly punches the brakes hard so we slide on sandy road, stopping a foot away from the checkpoint rope. I see it only now. Dust has all but obscured the cement guard hut. A couple of meters off the road a gendarme sits on a wooden bench, hunched over and buried in a woolen military greatcoat, lapels pulled high, his arms folded, and his face tucked into his chest. An old bolt action rifle stands between his legs, the barrel leaning against his shoulder. He lifts a dust-caked khaki face, so pale, he looks painted. The gendarme peers at us and jerks his head impatiently at the rope, and buries his face again.

Issoufou studies the man a moment. He pulls his kerchief over his nose, and gets out of the car, waving and smiling. He says in Hausa: Kai soja,iska lafiya--"Hey soldier, wind is healthy." The gendarme simply waves back and Issoufou, holding his smile, nods and unhooks the rope from a wooden post. Just to be sure, perhaps to make the return trip a little easier, Issoufou walks over to the gendarme and stuffs a folded 500-franc bill in a side pocket of the greatcoat.

The gendarme never looks up.

(top)

The Falling Out

A poem by Marjorie Stelmach

What happened to flesh --that unloveable block
with the fat-voweled name, straight from the tongue
of the cave we were first shaped to fit: the Body,
remember?-- stubby all over, fingers so far from gesture
it's odd to ponder the way they've grown
so adept at the lighting of long, tapered candles;
learned to slip into gloves; to cut
with finesse a tarot deck. What happened
to flesh? When did it first understand that it must
stand still, behave, stop scratching, allow
the grown-ups to talk? At Aerobics, once,
the teacher lofted and held a full pound of fat,
an ugly glob she'd bought from a butcher.
That night we brought real passion
to sit-ups. Confronted with visual proof
of the starved Soul, sliced like a wedding ham and hung
aloft for the light to pass--would we fall en masse
to our knees? When did the Soul fall out of flesh
into air and peer back at the Body: clearing its throat
in disapproval; tapping its dissatisfaction
with manicured nails on the hardwood
of waxed dining tables; quickening days
with something akin to desire, but dry