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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'Ghost towns, corporate cruelty, the centuries-old relationship between humans and a species almost magical in its abilities … fabulous.' The New York Times 'A beautifully written book on diamond smuggling, the universe, life and much of what lies in between.' Toby Muse, author of Kilo: Life and Death Inside the Secret World of the Cocaine Cartels For nearly 80 years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed "overmined" and abandoned, journalist and author Matthew Gavin Frank set out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade – the smuggling of diamonds by carrier pigeon – that supplies a global market. Uncovering a long overlooked truecrime story dating back to the founding of the De Beers corporation, and blending elements of reportage, memoir and legend, he weaves interviews with local diamond divers, who extract mineral wealth from the seabed by day and raise pigeons in secret by night, with harrowing anecdotes from former heads of security, environmental managers, and vigilante pigeon hunters. A rare and remarkable portrait of exploitation and greed, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers reveals how these feathered bandits became outlaws in every mining town. 'Unforgettable. … An outstanding adventure in its lyrical, utterly compelling, and heartbreaking investigations of the world of diamond smuggling.' Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic and World of Wonders 'A lyrical portrait of a resilient species caught in the grinding gears of a cruel industry of extraction and exploitation.' Kirk Wallace Johnson, author of The Feather Thief
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Praise forFlight of the Diamond Smugglers
“A beautifully written book on diamond smuggling, the universe, life and much of what lies in between … Throughout it all, this book reminds us that the world is a place of wonder if only we look.”
—Toby Muse, author of Kilo: Inside the Cocaine Cartels —from the Jungles to the Streets
“For too long, the lowly pigeon has been seen as an urban nuisance, undeserving of our attention, and too common to be seen in a magical or heroic light. Matthew Gavin Frank’s compelling investigation into the bird’s unexpected role in the diamond trade is here to change that: Flight of the Diamond Smugglers is a lyrical portrait of a resilient species caught in the grinding gears of a cruel industry of extraction and exploitation.”
—Kirk Wallace Johnson, author of The Feather Thief
“Matthew Gavin Frank has done something new and wonderful in his mining of the many places where birds and gems and companionship live, deep within the alternately brutal and profound chambers of the human heart.”
—Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses
“Unforgettable … An outstanding adventure in its lyrical, utterly compelling, and heartbreaking investigations of the world of diamond smuggling.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic and World of Wonders
“There is no living essayist better at weaving wildly disparate worlds into a single, gorgeously lyrical whole. Flight of the Diamond Smugglers finds meaning in pigeons, diamonds, murder, love, and lost pregnancies. It is a journey with its own wild logic.”
—Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
For Fava
If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea.
—W. G. Sebald
Contents
Author’s Note
With the exception of historical figures, public figures, and my partner, Louisa, all names have been changed. Certain quotes have been reconstructed from memory, to the best of my ability.
Prologue
After our sixth miscarriage, my partner, Louisa, and I decided that we could no longer endure another attempt at conceiving a child. In the nights that followed, we slept little, often waking in the middle of the night to sit up together in bed, stretch our hands out in front of us, fingers splayed. We did these exercises according to the ob-gyn’s instructions, to stimulate blood flow, to decrease the chance of Louisa cramping in sleep, decrease her dependency on the pain pills. We would neurotically peruse my nightstand notebook in which we had recorded pages of potential baby names over the last few years. We would comment on how the name ideas had changed, evolved, doubled back on themselves—a sad little record of our personalities in microcosm over that period. Each of these names was a ghost, we told ourselves.
In the middle of the night, we started reciting—aloud, as if in mantra or lullaby—the names of these ghosts, of each distinctive personality Louisa and I almost had the shot at spending our lives with. Next to me was the rectangle of bare nightstand wood, framed in dust, where my Dad’s Pregnant Too book once rested. The farrago of loneliness was insidious and unevolving—hard, unholdable, unrockable, unfeedable fact. We feared all this love we had inside of us would ever remain stupidly, perfectly unrequited.
“I need to be around my family … soon,” Louisa began repeating. And so, soon after the loss, we traveled to South Africa, Louisa’s home country, in order to seek solace with her family and to conduct 2a funeral ceremony of sorts at the Big Hole in Kimberley. A gaping open-pit and underground diamond mine that was active from 1871 to 1914, the Big Hole is a man-made Grand Canyon. Nearly fifty years after mining operations ceased, Kimberley’s city council, in an effort to boost the town’s economy, decided to rebrand the Big Hole as a tourist attraction. They built a museum and, in this new context, what had previously been dismissed as old rusty mining junk now became “important historical relics.” It has been drawing curious travelers since the mid-1960s, and some of Louisa’s happiest childhood memories—into which she would often retreat as part of the grieving process—involve her long-ago family vacations there.
With a thermos of ashes, we squatted at sunset beneath the Big Hole’s red observation deck, and stared into what is often claimed to be the biggest hole excavated by hand in the world. We listened to the vibrations above us as other tourists stepped onto the deck, their bodies suspended to take their panoramic photos.
We tried not to name this one. I recited the Jewish mourner’s Kaddish there at the threshold—all 42 acres of its surface area, 1,519 feet of its width, all 22,500,000 tons of excavated, missing earth, and Louisa’s contribution was the final “Amen.” Her syllables echoed downward through the shaft, from basalt to melaphyre to quartzite to quartz porphyry, to the Vaal River conglomerate, to deeply impacted and ancient granite gneiss. We watched the burnt bridal veil-ness of the scattering, the arching of this tiny atomized body all 790 feet down to the floor of this abyss that once revealed to us the stories of rocks and the burden of 6,000 pounds of diamonds.
In order to contextualize my grief—however inadequately, but essentially—I became obsessed with the history of the Big Hole, which was, after all, the actual context and physical space into which we decided to embed the ashes of our final miscarriage, and, in turn, this phase in our lives. I desperately wanted to know what the Big Hole, and all of the other stories it contained, could tell us about 3the parameters of our own—to find out, in part, what our grief was made of.
In order to foster this conversation between our lives and this larger history, I began to consider diamonds, and the industry they birthed. Pretty soon, I found pigeons.
Like many who carry a childish sort of curiosity into adulthood, I am attracted to forbidden places. I trespass. When I heard that a portion of South Africa’s West Coast was owned by the De Beers conglomerate and had been officially closed off to the public for the better part of eighty years (the heyday of diamond exploration and mining in the area), plunging the local communities into a mysterious isolation, I became infatuated with the idea of visiting the place. During this “heyday,” everyone in Die Sperrgebiet (the Forbidden Zone), as it was called, labored for De Beers; no one was allowed to leave the area. De Beers kept the residents distracted with trucked-in luxuries and social programs. Fully furnished and well-stocked houses were provided. Sundries were provided, and regularly replaced. De Beers set up their own school system for the children, and provided various entertainments and recreational clubs. De Beers even had a shadowy agreement with satellite companies to redact images of the Forbidden Zone from their recorded files. It was, officially, an erasure from the earth: terra incognita meets planned community. Heavily armed security forces guarded (and still guard) its borders.
Beginning in 2007, De Beers deemed portions of this land “overmined,” and as they began to withdraw their interests in the ensuing years, the doors to some of these towns slowly began opening to the public for the first time. Though De Beers still controls the area, and though signs threatening trespassers with imprisonment and/or death still proliferate roadside, restricted public entry is now possible.
I badly wanted to listen to the stories of those who live there. Eventually, I navigated the hoops necessary for a visit (replete with the sending of various copies of my passport and other identifying documents in advance, and subsequent background checks).4
My journey brought me to the mining towns of Alexander Bay, Port Nolloth, and Kleinzee on South Africa’s notorious Diamond Coast. Once there on the ground, the story that began to haunt me most, and focused my inquiries, was the one told to me one afternoon by a diamond digger and diver (and curator of the ramshackle Port Nolloth Museum). His story was about the various ingenious methods employed by those who participate in the thriving and ancillary “industry” of “illicit” diamond smuggling, of which he admitted he was a part. One such method involved the sneaking of trained carrier pigeons onto the mine property, affixing diamonds to the birds, and sending them into the air to fly from the mine to the workers’ homes. When overeager laborers began affixing too many diamonds to the birds, though, the exhausted and overloaded pigeons began to falter, and landed at random along the beaches of the Diamond Coast.
De Beers officials caught wind of this and, having infiltrated the local governments, had it declared illegal to raise pigeons in the region. In fact, in 1998, a local lawmaker made it illegal to not shoot a pigeon on sight, should one have the means to do so. Still, many here raise pigeons in secret, and sometimes successfully smuggle diamonds using this method. But those who are caught suffer various consequences—official and unofficial. Sometimes, those suspected of raising pigeons (and subsequently smuggling diamonds) simply disappear.
I began to wonder what these stories might mean. What these stories might reveal when told in conjunction with other, seemingly dissimilar stories. I wanted to speak to those who still raise pigeons in secret, who still smuggle in spite of the consequences. I wanted to speak to those who are charged with levying said consequences. I wanted to burrow into the hidden alleyways and natures of this big international business, using as a lens its impact on a handful of small, secluded towns on the Diamond Coast—the towns, one can argue, most directly and viscerally affected by this big international conglomerate. I wanted 5to find out about the industry policies—declared and undeclared, official and unofficial—that made such ingenuity (the likes of the “pigeon-method”) necessary, possible, and still prevalent.
I found, strangely, that people were willing to open up to me—often eagerly and urgently—about the things they had seen and done, as a mere result of my anomalous presence there (which the local rumor mills rapidly circulated). A conversation with one person invariably led to a related conversation with another person. People, oftentimes wishing to unburden themselves of their stories, tended to find me, and together we whirled down the proverbial rabbit-hole. In order to situate these contemporary stories within a larger context, I soon began to investigate various mythologies across history and cultures, to find out where our stories of pigeons intersect with our stories of diamonds.
It may sound moony, but I became interested in the notion of carriage itself, and the language we lend to it; the act of loading and sometimes overloading a pigeon with cargo we deem valuable, and the benefits and consequences thereof; the ways in which the labors of the carrier pigeon connect, however lyrically and ephemerally, to problems with the act of carrying, to miscarriage.
In the aftermath of writing of this book, I try, and often fail, to take comfort in Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez’s admission, in the acknowledgments of his book News of a Kidnapping, with regard to the book’s subjects: “My only frustration is knowing that none of them will find on paper more than a faded reflection of the horror they endured in their real lives … I share this sense of inadequacy [and] … To all the protagonists and my collaborators, I offer my eternal gratitude for not allowing this gruesome drama to sink into oblivion … with the hope that the story it tells will never befall us again.” My sense of inadequacy here, too, remains overwhelming.
Chapter 1
Msizi and His Bird
In Msizi’s lungs, the diamond dust embeds itself into the pink muscle tissue, the sponge and the honeycomb. This is the dust that will, most assuredly, elicit the growth of collagenous nodules, making it difficult—for the rest of his life—for the child to breathe. In his hands, a pigeon named Bartholomew.
This is the pigeon, he believes, that will provide him reparations for his future medical issues, that will allow him, his mother, and his brother, their deserved riches. This is the pigeon that is not only a pet, but also an agent of smuggling, the pigeon that the mine bosses believe is an accessory to a quiet—but punishable—piracy. Bartholomew doesn’t think of words like weight or capacity, or weighed-down, or over-capacity, but he knows what it’s like to have too many diamonds tied to his feet.
Msizi is afraid of getting caught. He is afraid, and he is thirteen years old, and he is sitting cross-legged in the red dust and white sand, and Bartholomew coos as Msizi strokes the feathers with his good pinky, and Bartholomew wriggles like a liver when the child tightens his grip involuntarily as he coughs up his blood. When he stops coughing, he tells me, “I probably should not be showing you him,” meaning the pigeon. “I don’t want him to die.”
“Why are you?” I ask.
Msizi takes one hand from Bartholomew, extends his index finger, 8and runs it along the skin of my forearm. “My mother says to,” he answers. “She says you are probably safe.” His voice is thin, but deep—too deep, it seems, for his age and slight frame. He smiles and begins to laugh a little, a laugh that quickly becomes another coughing fit. I confess that I do not know what his answer means, that all of my guesses are uneducated. When I ask him to clarify, he shrugs his shoulders, smiles again, and says nothing.
It’s Sunday. We are on a beach just on the South African side of the Namibian border, on the outskirts of the restricted mining town of Oranjemund, sitting beneath a sun-bleached sign that reads “No Entry.” Here, we are mere specks in the middle of the Namaqualand region, 444,000 square kilometers of arid desert that encompasses the western coasts of Namibia and South Africa. Sitting concealed against the lee of a dune, we are about a kilometer from where Msizi lives in a small house with his mother and brother. We can hear, but can’t see, the ocean roaring. Msizi and I found each other this morning in the small dirt parking lot of the local multipurpose store, which sells an array of sundries from canned food to electronics. As he was wearing the palatinate blue overalls worn by those who labor in the diamond pits here, Louisa encouraged me to approach him and his mother, to tell them what, in part, I’m doing here. When I finished my spiel, his mother, disarmingly, urged Msizi, “Speak to him.” The infant-sized sack of cornmeal shifted in her arms. We organized to meet here, this evening. It was his mother, he tells me, who told him to bring Bartholomew.
The sand at our backs is cooling, but still warm. This is the first stop along my planned route down the Diamond Coast, and I have been urged by the locals, Msizi’s mother included, to be careful while driving here, as many of the roads are private—for diamond industry workers only. The guards patrolling the roads, apparently, are often directed to shoot first and ask no questions whatsoever. I catch myself staring at Msizi’s lame pinky. The wind cakes my molars with dust.9
He tells me of being lowered into pits and shafts by older and bulkier men, a thin rope cinched under his arms. He does not show me the scars at his armpits, but I have seen him scratching. Msizi is wearing his work uniform—the blue jumpsuit—even though it’s his day off. It hangs loose over his body, and is sun-bleached and sand-softened, worn at the elbows and knees, cuffs and collar. It is speckled with faded orange stains that appear to be old blood. Msizi speaks of the digging required to fill burlap sacks with dirt, returning to the surface, rinsing and sifting through the contents for anything that catches the light and refracts it.
“Some days are good,” he says, “and some days are bad. Some days, no stones. That’s when they think I’m hiding something. I only use Bartholomew if I find a good amount, early in the day. I have to wait for when no one is looking at me.” He smiles, and raises Bartholomew as if assessing his weight. “We are good at being invisible,” he says, more to the bird than to me.
We don’t speak of how a diamond is an allotrope of carbon, or of the stone’s high refractive index of nearly 2.5. Nothing of how this measurement makes both physicists and brides-to-be salivate. Nothing of rainbows. On these issues, and others, the pigeon also stays quiet, searching for warmth in the hidden pockets of its own breast. Only when the circling vultures make their velociraptor screams does Bartholomew turn toward the sky. Msizi scratches at his dry scalp. His knuckles, too, are dry and cracking. His eyes are bloodshot and seem to be permanently so, as if they’ve taken in too much sand.
“I start at four,” Msizi says, and I’m not sure if he’s referring to his age when he began laboring in the diamond mines, or the morning hour at which he begins his shift. Though recent child labor laws in South Africa prohibit the hire of someone under the age of fifteen, the law is rarely enforced. According to a 2016 report by the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, “Gaps in labor law and criminal law enforcement remain. Children in South Africa [continue to] engage in 10the worst forms of child labor.” According to the same report, the percentages of children between the ages of five and fourteen who work, who attend school, or who combine work and school are all “unavailable.” One recent survey found that 46 percent of diamond miners were between the ages of five and sixteen.
The sun is down, but the red earth holds its light, makes it seem as if it’s still up. Msizi and I listen out for voices or footsteps or the cocking of a gun, but all I can hear is the ocean and the wind, and the sand blowing against our bodies. I imagine the three of us as glimpsed through a sniper’s scope, the crosshairs bobbing from Bartholomew to Msizi to me.
Msizi noses deeply into the feathers, knows that a feather stripped of barbs is bone. The code of the body. The positioning system in the synapses, the electric impulses, the capillaries, the heart. Like all of us, the bird knows something, but does not know how it knows it. The bird does not even coo. The bird, in fact, shows no outward signs of pleasure, or affection, at all.
“They’d probably kill me for talking to you,” Msizi says, smiling.
“Who?” I ask, and Msizi shrugs. “Then why are you talking to me? Your mom said it was okay.”
Msizi sniffs at Bartholomew’s head. He laughs weakly; more of a dry heave than a laugh. “Can you run fast?” he asks.
“I can run fast.”
He stops smiling. “They’d probably kill you also, for talking to me. And you’re still talking to me.”
I want to ask, “Who?” again, but I know this is a stupid question. There are so many answers to it. I begin to wonder why Msizi’s mother chose to trust me. Surely, in these diamond towns, she’s seen men who look like me break the bodies of children who look like Msizi.
Armed men are well paid to protect the rough diamond harvest at all costs—a harvest that can exceed 176 million carats per year. At 200 milligrams per carat, that amounts to 35,200,000 grams, or 1177,603 pounds of diamonds produced for sale in a single year. To these armed men and those who employ them, Msizi and I are comparatively worthless.
*
Decorating this Namaqualand beach: a gold-plated necklace, its pendant a broken heart; a dog-chewed doll, her stuffing breaching the cloth of her arms; a dog’s red collar; a South African flag; many fish carcasses in various stages of decay, some eyeless, some with eyes watching the sky. A few times per year, confused pigeons with diamonds at their feet land on beaches such as this one, on the ribcages and caudal fins, faces and tails of the dead fish—fish named snoek and kingklip, slimeskate and catshark, puzzled toadfish and leaden labeo. Dime-sized horseflies whirl, and the pigeons land, confused because someone overloaded them with diamonds again. The pigeons will not make it to the miners’ homes, to the spouses who expected to untie the stones, sell them on the black market, and get rich enough so that no one in their families will ever again have to work the mines.
When a carrier pigeon is overloaded with cargo, it loses its natural GPS, and this is what happens: a confetti of feathers and gems decorate the beach, and lovers stop kissing, and combers stop combing, and parents leave their children to the whimsy of the waves, and they yell and they point, and they fight, and they tear the diamonds from the pigeons’ feet, sometimes tearing off the feet themselves, and, in the sand, no one can tell if it’s the blood of the birds or the blood of the humans, but they fill their pockets, and their noses are running, and their children are underwater, and they are richer, and so they quiet one another. So no one else hears them, they quiet one another. At least one of the mine workers—maybe the culprit, maybe someone mistaken for the culprit—will have his pinky finger broken, or eye excised, or hands or ears or feet, or head, cut off.12
When I ask Msizi about these punishments, and how and why and when and by whom they are administered, his voice goes quiet. He’s not smiling anymore. He seems worried, and exasperated with me. Though we are clearly alone, he looks around the beach for eavesdroppers. He tells me that he is prohibited from talking about it—that if the mine security guards find out he has spoken to an outsider like me, they may call in the services of someone called Mr. Lester. As Msizi begins to describe Mr. Lester, his voice lowers in volume but increases in speed and pitch. His good fingers are nervously working Bartholomew’s feathers. A strange clicking sound, like a time bomb, emanates from someplace within the bird. It seems to me, as Msizi speaks, that this Mr. Lester is probably just a fabricated threat, a tall tale meant to frighten the child workers and keep them obedient—but what do I know?
“But then why did your mom allow …?” I begin again, but Msizi cuts me off, continuing to describe Mr. Lester. His voice grows shaky and ecstatic. He’s almost whining.
Apparently, Mr. Lester is ten meters tall, breathes fire, has sharp teeth, no eyes, the wings of a raptor, and the ability to infiltrate one’s dreams. Apparently, there’s a good chance he knows all about our meeting here, and the content of the conversation we’re having in real time. It’s a small, insular community. Outsiders vividly stand out. People talk. Cameras and recording devices may be hidden just about anywhere. Freelance spies abound. Msizi is visibly upset as he divulges this to me, and he’s squeezing Bartholomew, so I decide not to press further. I scribble Mr. Lester on the back of an old Engen gas station receipt, and tuck it into my jacket pocket. Bartholomew shifts uncomfortably, then settles down as Msizi’s grip loosens.
The carrier pigeon’s life is one of servitude and, thereby, mutilation. Of flight girdled. Msizi tells me that he has fashioned little smuggling bags out of old cornmeal sacks, and that, on a good day, Bartholomew can accommodate up to four of them: one cinched to each foot, one tied beneath each wing. Not all days are good—sometimes there is only 13one bag, sometimes none at all. Msizi tells me that Bartholomew’s left foot is the stronger one, and that he only uses the wing bags on the most bountiful of days, as they can stifle the bird’s air vents there. He tells me that he’s more careful than most; that he usually doesn’t try to sneak Bartholomew onto mine property more than once a week. If someone else gets caught smuggling, he tells me, he’ll wait up to three weeks before trying to use the bird again.
These timelines aren’t hard and fast. He admits that there have been occasions when he was feeling reckless or angry, or desperate, or lucky; nervous-excited times when he dared to sneak the bird onto mine property five days in one week. “Everybody does it. Or tries to do it,” he tells me. “Everybody knows. So you have to be tricky. Sometimes, I’m the trickiest.”
“Everybody knows?” I ask him.
Msizi waves his hand, and Bartholomew stretches his wings. Up close like this, they appear longer than I would have expected. “Yeah, you know. Ask anyone. You have to be tricky.”
“So the guards know?”
“Of course. Go ask them. They’re the best at taking away the diamonds.”
“You mean, smuggling them?”
“Yeah, of course. Go ask them.”
I scribble furiously on the back of another receipt. In the distance, the ocean sounds as if it’s sizzling, boiling something alive. A pink crab spider emerges from a hole in the sand, tests the air, and decides to return to its lair.
“Do you ever deal with any of the guards? Sell to them, I mean? Are some of them middlemen, you know …”
“I can’t, I can’t,” Msizi says.
“Who, for the most part, buys them from you?”
“Everyone. So many people. Not just one type. Everybody knows. It is very easy here. You just have to be tricky.”14
When I ask Msizi how much his family makes from the smuggled diamonds, he refuses to give me a figure. He smiles, shakes his head, slaps my shoulder, and says, “Nah …” When I press, he assures me that it’s not much, but only slightly more per carat than he makes as the “legitimate” bonus that De Beers gives to diamond diggers—which is, according to Msizi, the equivalent of about 20 cents. When I question the accuracy of that figure, as it seems surprisingly low, Msizi confirms it.
In contrast to Msizi’s makeshift smuggling bags, “official” trainers of carrier pigeons have designed tiny and expensive backpacks, fitted to the pigeons’ bodies, to be filled with anything from confidential blueprints for spacecraft meant to land on Mars, to heroin meant for prison inmates, to declarations of love and war, to blood samples, to heart tissue, to diamonds—anything we secretly desire, or desire to keep secret. Our underbellies, our interior lives, our fetishes, our wishes. A clandestine network mapping the diagrams and fluctuations of our ids, tied to bird-backs and bird-feet, twining the air above us—the air we’re so busy trying to dominate, to bring down to our level.
Bartholomew tries to get away, but Msizi traps him with his good hand. The pigeon, alarmed, makes a grunting sound.
When first lowered into an underground mine, Msizi tells me, it’s ceremonial and superstitious to exhale voluminously and with bravado, leaving a portion of oneself, in breath form, behind on the surface. When he demonstrates this exhale for me, it begets another one of his terrible coughing fits. He spits pink saliva to the sand. He tells me that legend has it that the breath will lend luck to the subterranean body, wait for the corporeal form to return to the surface, and reclaim the air into the lungs in an exhausted sort of homecoming.
“It’s like magic,” he says.
Bartholomew opens his beak. The pigeon’s exhale is a coo-cum-hiss. In the articulation of its jaw joint, concludes ornithologist Dr. Jeff Birdsley (yes), is the most “important vestige of the [pigeons’] ancestral 15relationship to reptiles.” Their necks coil like snakes, but we can’t see this when they’re alive and well, fat-breasted and double-chinned as they are, loaded with secrets and jewels. We can see this best only when they’re dead.
*
That night, Louisa and I try to sleep on the horrible mattress at the local caravan park. When I close my eyes, I see red sand and birds and thin men with fat guns. I see Msizi again, walking home from our meeting for supper along a seam where the sand had drifted into other sand. When I open them, I watch the shadows of the mosquitoes at our window screen, their bloodthirsty ballet. Louisa pats my ribcage, tries to calm me down, tells me that I need sleep. I try to take comfort in thoughts of more familiar places—of our mundane “real life,” and our home back in the Midwestern U.S: our kitchen, our bedroom, our laundry room, our backyard. I envision us on our patio there, so far from any desert, lying on our matching chaise longues and sipping our whiskies at sundown, the fireflies just beginning to show themselves, the crickets beginning their songs. The mosquitoes back home are different than the mosquitoes here—ganglier and less inclined to bite, bored by the regional familiarity of our blood. The mosquitoes here are still excited to drain us.
The too-bright security lantern outside our dorm pops its orange over the walls. I can see where someone long ago soaked their brush with too much white paint. The walls of the place are comprised of a series of these arrested old drips, none having quite made it to the linoleum; arrested mid-wall, as if mid-air. Our middles dip nearly to the floor. They don’t quite make it either.
