Richard Dik-dik: Chapter 3

Recap:
Read Chapter 1 here
Read Chapter 2 here

Raj was born wild, but raised at the Abdullah bin Khalifa Rescue Center for Even-Toed Ungulates. It was a peculiar name: bin Khalifa was the 10th Sultan of the island of Zanzibar. He ruled for just three years in the 1960’s, during which, as a double amputee, he had neither even toes nor odd.

It’s an even lesser-known fact that the Sultan held a funeral service for his own severed leg after his first amputation. Upon his death, a separate service was held to reunite his limb with the rest of his body. Keeping with tradition, the Center did the same, staging elaborate burial services for the bits and pieces that inevitably went missing from the assorted wild creatures that came into their care.

How Raj arrived there isn’t documented, nor is much else about their work. In one villager’s account, the Center was run by nuns. In another, hippies. Just about the only consistency between their stories was a young woman named Magdalene Joy, who by name alone didn’t solve the mystery: she sounded just as likely to be a nun as a hippie.

Magdalene Joy was the matron of the Center, and she tended to the animals with all the distant love and well-intended minor neglect her parents had raised her with. At just seventeen, she left her family’s tidy colonial in New Jersey to “live more authentically,” which, in her mind, meant going anywhere without lawn care and strip malls. She landed first in a Baltimore row house and took a few community college courses in something called urban recreation, but the structure of a syllabus and the sound of an alarm clock didn’t feel like her authentic self either.

Perhaps she joined the Peace Corps, or taught English to Namibian villagers, or joined up with the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa. Either way, at age twenty-four, Magdalene Joy found her way to Tanzania, then to the Abdullah bin Khalifa Rescue Center. She found kindred spirits among the gazelles, the ibex, the zebras, the oryx, and the Dik-diks. She took solace in cleaning pens, mending wounds, picking burs, brushing knots, trimming hooves. Mostly, Magdalene Joy discovered she loved soft things with horns.

For Raj’s part, the Center was home, and Magdalene Joy was his mother. She bottle-fed him at least three times a day and five when she could remember, chewing amphetamine-like khat leaves as she sang the same Carpenters and Linda Ronstadt songs her own mother sang to her when she was a child. The khat leaves made her a bit clumsy yet turbocharged, so she was prone to spilling water and overfilling bowls and sometimes hugging the animals a bit too tightly. Yet there was no mistaking her inebriation for carelessness. Her love was no violence.

At dusk, she slipped away from the enclosed pens, the adobe-bricked walls, and the metal roofs of the rescue compound to drink bottles of Kilimanjaro and Tusker beer with the sisal farmers. Fresh from the fields, the men still carried the implements of their labor: curved machetes used to cut the spiny, sword-like leaves before they are bundled and taken to be stripped of everything down to a single fiber, which is cleaned and dried and bundled again to be made into rugs, ropes, crafts, the tiniest entrepreneurial hopes.

Magdalene Joy didn’t come for the sisal; she came unabashedly for the men, all cut up and calloused, the bending, swinging machinations of the fields retraining their bodies to bend and swing even when they shouldn’t. They sat down like pipe cleaner figurines, their muscles and bones only relaxing as fast as their blood could distribute the Tusker. Magdalene Joy stopped by every evening to be soft to them, to laugh and be free and to learn the beautiful, guttural village songs they sang after hours. She stayed up long into the night learning the exotic sounds, the warbles and the whoops and the incredible harmonies that somehow moved the stale air, could disappear the itch of a barn fly bite, dissolved the homesickness into the next swig of lager. Most of the men were married, a few even faithfully, but they all fell for Magdalene Joy and her oversized hugs, her fairytale freckles, her propensity to run straight into things after all the khat leaves and beer. She was no nun after all.

Her early mornings were hangovers and eggs, then a short walk to buy a fresh bag of khat off the back of a rusty old farm truck. The rest of the day was for tending to the animals, combing them and feeding them and swatting away the incessant onslaught of tsetse flies. They are quite flamboyant, the tsetse flies — attracted to very bright colors, and to very dark colors, so that the only colors they aren’t attracted to aren’t really colors at all. In that sense, they are the Liberace of flies.

In time, a few of the sisal farmers began stopping by the Center at lunch, bringing with them scraps of food to share with Magdalene Joy, or small trinkets they had traded for in the village, or short verses they had written in English to impress her. They arrived like eager boys, and occasionally left like sour old men, grumpy and bruised that another villager had beat them to her company. Among Raj’s favorites was Hamisi, a wiry but strapping young farmer with only one outfit to his name. He was named in a small stroke of misfortune when his mother miscalculated the day, accidentally naming him Hamisi (“born on a Thursday”) when she should have named him Juma (“born on a Friday”). But the paperwork was signed, and so that was that: the record would forever show he was Hamisi, born on a Friday.

Hamisi was all ears and no money, plus a painful shyness that endeared him to Raj. He often arrived without announcing himself, let himself into the stables and waited quietly among the animals for Magdalene Joy to find him there, sometimes waiting so long that his lunch break expired without seeing her at all. He brought gifts of sisal, mostly: sisal bookmarks and sisal animal weavings and sisal ornaments and other sisal trinkets he wove in the night.

For Raj, Hamisi always brought a pocketful of popcorn, hand-feeding him a piece at a time while he waited patiently for Magdalene Joy. On the days she didn’t show, he just doled out the popcorn more slowly, alternating between feeding Raj and scratching behind his ears or rubbing the backside of his hand along Raj’s thin, downy neck. Raj loved the feeling of the warm, calloused hands brushing his fur until his eyes closed, the slow cadence of each stroke lulling him into a late morning trance. He loved how Hamisi smelled, too: like diesel fuel, too much musky cologne, and the earthy smell of sisal juice. Most of all, he loved the salt on the popcorn.

Hamisi began as another casual visitor, but his intentions escalated in a matter of weeks, just as they most always do when the sun is high and the air is unmoving and there is nothing left to do but fall asleep or in love. Some men find ways to be struck by every woman they meet, calculating the angles of her body or the cunning of her words, or memorizing the curious way her lips turn up at their edges; or scanning the furrow of her brow, the patchwork of freckles that move up her neck, the way she stands with one leg holding her weight and the other extended as a lure of sorts, until he has finally indexed upon a thing that smites him.

Others lock in on a single woman and they chase her in the most embarrassing of ways, lacking the patience and the fortitude to mount any attempt at a romantic campaign. There is nothing worse than watching the profligate courting habits of a man in chase; most often, the woman kindly refuses to be chased at all, and yet he keeps on running as if there is victory in sheer endurance. This kind of man spends his vitality and his fortune whirling up new schemes to impress, and in the end, having lost both vitality and fortune, he lands as his prize the kind of woman who enjoys schemes in the first place.

Hamisi was neither of these men at all. He was simply a strong, gangly young man who slept in a ramshackle hut to the sound of the coyotes, the slow breeze through the flowers of the eucalyptus, and the beat of his own heart. His heart now taken by Magdalene Joy, he lay awake at night draped in the absence that only love can create, counting the pauses where he was sure his heart had once beat, but now only waited. There is no silence quite so loud as an aching heart.

And so he conjured new and more frequent excuses to drop by the Center, often just to see Magdalene Joy in passing. Gates needed oiling. Thatch roofs needed mending. The putsi flies were laying eggs again in the still damp but drying towels, so he moved the clothesline into direct sunlight and screened it in, replacing the fraying old rope with a new one he hand-braided of sisal.

All along, Magdalene Joy watched him. Hamisi assumed she was visiting with Elijah or Baraka or Bijal or Edwin, and occasionally she was. A few times, she slept with these men, each still chewing khat as they made the kind of dispassionate love that is more of a release from each other than a coming together. The men seldom returned after that. It wasn’t that they didn’t long for her, because they did. But they sensed she was broken, worried they would break her further, as if there was anything a sisal farmer could do to her heart that hadn’t already been done by prep school boys in New Jersey.

Gradually, Hamisi’s handiwork turned the Center into something a grade or two above its former disrepair. The pen doors latched tightly and the nearby well pumped cleaner water again, so that Magdalene Joy could spend more time working and less time walking to the faraway well on the other side of the property. It was a repair Hamisi instantly regretted, stealing away the time he had once spent watching her long legs and bare feet and clumsy steps as they circumnavigated the Center grounds. To watch her walk, for Hamisi, was to bathe unknowingly in the neuroendocrinology of love. His brain practically quivered in its seismic release of dopamine and cortisol and its jarring halt of serotonin production, causing the simultaneous combination of sweaty palms, a rapidly increased heartbeat, the contraction of the blood vessels in his stomach, and a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder. It’s a feeling called lovesickness, and Hamisi craved its discomfort and pleasure so much that a few weeks later, he intentionally re-broke the nearby well handle, sabotaging the efficiency and general cleanliness of the Center for the greater good of his infatuation.

Magdalene Joy had watched him fix the well, and then watched him unfix it, too, and had felt his eyes on her no matter which one she walked to, the nearby or the faraway. A woman can always feel a man’s eyes on her. She can feel how soft his gaze is, how honest, how distracted, how dangerous, how devoted or not. Hamisi’s eyes did not cast a Catholic school boy stare, weighted down by the inevitability of locker room gossip or confessions to the priest or boasts to his father. It was not a “four Tusker lagers” stare either, the feeling a woman gets in the pub when there are too many eyes on her and not enough exits. It was something entirely new: a feeling of warmth, desire, kindness, and humility. She didn’t just feel his want for her; she felt his own hope that he could live up to her expectations.

And so she tried her hardest to walk with grace and aplomb at every trip to the faraway well, to not outwardly show her persistent mild innebriation and innate lack of coordination. Naturally she failed, sloshing entire buckets of water across the skirt of her summer sundress and the worn dirt paths before she was halfway back from the pump, each time feeding Hamisi’s infatuation for her just a little more. “No matter,” Magdelaine Joy thought every time, standing with a near-empty bucket amidst the drought lands of East Africa. “The entire earth is practically water.”

It’s of no use to dwell on the coupling and eventual marriage of Magdalene Joy and Hamisi, who coupled just as humans do, and wed in much the same way. While it’s tempting to speculate whether or not a dowry was paid, or if the event was held during Shawwal, this speculation conceals far more interesting and trivial details, which are these: the bride’s parents were no-shows on account of a hysterical fear of vaccinations, inoculations, and of being kidnapped from a village with no history of kidnapping. They sent in their place a rather large crystal vase procured from a mid-tier American department store, three place settings of sterling silver flatware in the Buttercup pattern, and an electric bread maker (rendered useless without a voltage converter, not included) accompanied by a trio of fancy pre-packaged bread mixes including Caramel Apple Pie Quick Bread, Pumpkin Pecan Scones, and Pineapple Brown Sugar Loaf. The card — complete with the neatly folded gift receipt (Pineapple Brown Sugar Loaf, $14.95) — read simply, “To you, on your wedding day,” a lazy stroke of copywriting that had thus far earned the even more lazily named American Greeting Card Corporation a tidy $21.7 million dollars as a perennial bestseller.

While the glass vase and sterling flatware fit squarely in the New Jersey tradition of gifting newlyweds useless and ostentatious displays of faux-wealth, the groom’s family skewed to a different side of tradition. To Hamisi and Magdalene Joy, they presented a selection of traditional housewares they believed every new bride needs in order to properly provide for her husband and his guests, including a charcoal stove (the Center already had a much nicer kerosene one) a coconut grater, a bowl for serving fruit, some dish covers for keeping out the dust, a lidded basket, and a set of sleeping mats for visitors.

The worst gifts of all arrived from overseas friends and family. They sent trinkets from religions neither bride nor groom belonged to, brass frames for pictures when the couple had none to frame, and ladle upon ladle until Magdalene Joy and Hamisi began to question how often other couples ladle things, having not owned or used one themselves in the two decades prior to their marriage. In Western countries, a wedding is an excuse to give the new couple what you think they need more of in their lives. In this case, it was crosses and ladles.

Deep inside, the only gift Magdalene Joy had wished to receive for her wedding was enough money to get a small tattoo of an African Collared Dove on her ankle, the very presence of which she believed would bring her and Hamisi bountiful peace, love, and light.

Hamisi, who was considerably more religious but also more practical, just wanted lightbulbs that weren’t the filament kind. The stables and main house needed something longer lasting, brighter, and more cost conscious. He hoped for enough cash from the combined families and their guests to experiment with newer, filament-less bulbs — the kind that use less wattage and only need replaced every year or two.

Having asked for but not received, they swiftly and guiltlessly sold the trinkets from their families (minus the sleeping mats) at the Center’s yard sale the following weekend, netting enough money from the sterling silver flatware alone to pay for Magdalene Joy’s tattoo (in black and white for now, though she pined for full color) and half of Hamisi’s light bulbs. Predictably, nobody bought the vase, which is a universal rule of yard sales: nobody ever buys the vase.

With the wedding and commemorative yard sale now over — newly tattooed and more adequately illuminated — the couple settled into the kind of life Magdalene Joy had chased unknowingly since she first escaped New Jersey: a life of animal shit, with five hundred thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. Magdalene Joy never wanted to be wild. She wanted to play at being wild, to bottle it and carry it alongside her myriad creature comforts, American-style. She decided not to sell the bread maker after all, or the prepackaged artisan mixes. She kept all twelve hotel style bath towels, too. And in a final moment of uncertainty — a panic of sorts around domestic preparedness — Magdalene Joy snatched a ladle and buried it deep in the confines of her Zanzibar wooden chest.

It should be said here that a Dik-dik is not meant to be stuffed into a bag of any sort, be it a leather duffel bag or a 20-gallon trash can liner or an organic cotton grocery satchel. A common code among all living species should be not to bag one another, for to bag something is to imply that you intend to take it away from where it wants to be, then quite often mistreat it once it is taken. Case in point: Goldfish are bagged at the pet store before they are taken to inadequately aerated bowls in kids bedrooms around the world. Crickets are bagged before they are taken to be fed alive to pet iguanas and bearded dragons. A woman once put a cat in her purse and took it to a crowded movie theater for a matinee, and that is as far as we will proceed with that story out of respect for both the overstimulated cat and the unwitting theater goers.

And yet as simple and universal as this axiom seems — to not bag one another — Raj woke sometime in the wee hours of a Sunday morning stuffed into what felt like a burlap sack, the same kind that bulk coffee is sold in or that young humans climb into to hop feverishly towards a chalk finish line. They hop until they fall over, red in the face with their tongues sticking out, then right themselves and desperately hop some more. It’s all done in hopes of winning a satin ribbon — a blue for first prize, a red for second, and a white for third — that they can take home and boast to their parents about, having out-gunny-sacked the rest of the kindergarten class. In an egregious act of betrayal, though, the teachers award every kid a satin ribbon no matter when, how, or even if they finish the race, including the boy who swung one leg entirely out of the sack and did a sort of run-scoot from the halfway mark. Thus, the smart kids learn early to question the point of things like burlap sack races and satin ribbons altogether and refuse to play such games of deception, binding them forever to a life of honesty in the working class. The cheats — arguably even smarter — just call this “outmaneuvering” and go on to be Senators.

The man who bagged Raj was certainly from the outmaneuvering class. He was a banker, after all; a loan officer during the week, and his very own repo man on the weekends. In his mind, the entire charade — lending at predatory rates, then taking back what was lent and more — was easily justifiable through a simple mathematical formula: he spent ¾ of his week giving, and only ¼ taking away. As long as the scales tipped in the balance of what he believed was magnanimity, he was living a just and moral life. But he was neither just nor moral. He drove a matte gray truck with matte grey wheels, both of which are acts of moral turpitude: one should never trust a person who pays a premium for dullness.

This greyness permeated far beyond his choice of careers and paint finishes. His skin had also developed a grey sheen about it, and he wore an ill-fitting grey suit that was all drape and no taper. His black attache case had faded to grey, the same way weather-worn oak does, or a head of hair past thirty-eight or forty. Had Magdalene Joy or Hamisi been around, they might have even said he smelled gray, like a used car salesman’s office trailer, or the church on Ash Wednesday.

Moments earlier, he had steered the matte gray truck off the main road and onto the Center’s dirt pathway, killing the truck’s headlamps so they didn’t cast shadows into the ramshackle buildings and huts and outhouses that dotted the property, seemingly and altogether likely placed at random. He slowed to a crawl, maneuvering to the stables on the far side of the Center, away from the main house where Hamisi and Magdalene Joy were sleeping off a heavy meal of stew and sweet Tanzanian crepes from the evening before. It was early; an African Grass Owl still perched in the open, hoping to snag an elephant shrew, a mole rat, a hedgehog, or anything alive not exceeding its maximum 3.5 ounce portion size.

The grey man coasted to a stop, pulled the parking brake (despite being parked on a flat surface), climbed from the cabin, then opened the toolbox in the truck bed and rifled through it for his burlap sack and trusted tactical flashlight. The tactical flashlight had cost him $8 dollars extra purely for the marketing word “tactical,” but he did not know that by design: Even bankers lose money to marketers. Nature and capitalism always have a pecking order.

Tactical or not, the flashlight — which was at least properly angle-headed like those of military issue, able to achieve forward illumination while clipped to his belt buckle — made quick work of finding his bounty. There, at the northernmost end of the stable, in the second to the last pen on the left, the grey man found Raj curled inward the way a dog sleeps, with his own nose to his hind quarters, snoring the smallest snore that anyone had barely heard. It made even the grey man reconsider for a moment; this tiniest and most fragile of lives, on such a vast and cruel planet, deserved a life of leisure more than anyone.

But the terms had been violated, and the terms were the terms. When the Center needed money for a new roof and an old tractor, the Second National Bank of Microfinance had provided, as staunch supporters of local agriculture and entrepreneurialism and small fine print. The grey man had stamped the approval himself, requiring as collateral only Raj and a few other livestock assets that now, as the loan was being called, turned out to be long since dead and buried. Fragile or not, Raj belonged to the bank now, even though the Center had paid for him three times over in interest alone. This, to the grey man, was no grey matter.

He used two hands to scoop Raj up, but it would only have taken one. The burlap sack, a standard 18” by 30” variety, was even more oversized than the grey man’s suit, so that Raj looked like a single marble poking out of the bottom of an otherwise empty marble sack. Halfway back to the truck, the grey man noticed the new filament-less lightbulbs overhead that Hamisi had installed as his wedding gift to himself, which promised the irresistible tradeoff of an extraordinarily high upfront cost in exchange for disproportionately low savings spread out over the lifetime of the product. The grey man unscrewed as many as he could, deposited them into the burlap sack alongside Raj, and made his final sprint before gently returning his not-really-a-tactical flashlight to the toolbox in his truck bed, locking the lid, and carrying Raj (still inside the burlap sack of lightbulbs) with him back into the cabin.

The engine turned over with a minor sputter, and the grey man released the parking brake and crept back off the Center’s property just as he had entered. Back on the main roads, he drove in circles for a while, sipping a Tangawizi ginger soda and deciding what to do with a defaulted-upon dik-dik in the Eastern African twilight. Buffalo or cattle, he could sell or eat. But a dwarf antelope? This was lousy collateral, he thought. Next time he would secure the loan with copper piping or a small plot of land or a certificate for water rights. He thought for a moment about returning Raj to the Center, but then remembered that terms were terms. Microlending is not a business for the small, he said aloud without a hint of irony.

The grey man took his last sip of soda, then pulled the matte-grey truck over beside a large swath of grassland. He threw the bottle as far as he could, waiting to hear it land before he quietly opened the burlap sack, patted the top of Raj’s head, and nudged him out of the passenger’s seat and into the prairie. “Be free, little guy,” he said, nearly convinced now that this was an act of altruism or something like conscious capitalism. But Raj sat still for a while, the way one does when half asleep and kidnapped. Minutes went by, then minutes more, until Raj and the grey man had sat together — the gray man in the driver’s seat, and Raj beside the passenger’s, tucked restfully beneath the shade of the tire — in a small standoff for the better part of half an hour, the kidnapper and the kidnapped enjoying the old sounds of a Cuban rumba on the radio together. The rumba faded out to its inevitable ending, and with it, so faded Raj’s uncertainty. He could never find his way back to the Center, he realized. He could never tell Hamisi what had happened to the lightbulbs. He thought about whistling in anger, then decided against it in an act of self-preservation, not wanting to alert anything hungry that he was an available snack. With no small amount of fear and trepidation, he took his first timid steps away from the matte grey truck with the matte grey wheels, and thus the only life he had ever known; his adopted parents, his pen and his afternoon petting time and his popcorn. He was wild and free now, with no further balance due or payable.