‘Know who the little boy was?’
She didn’t like the look in his eye.
‘Yes.’ He came up close to her and the smell was unbreathable. He seemed to be struggling for the right word, or any word. ‘Sex,’ he said finally. ‘I like sex, Nell. Real sex.’
Fortunately his penis wasn’t listening.
‘Nothing to do with—’ He strained for the word and could not find it. Children, she supposed he meant.
He turned away as if she were the one with the putrid smell. Then he whipped back around, noticing her all over again.
‘Working, Nell Stone? Typing typing typing, so much to type, so much to say. It must be exhausting being Nell Stone all the time.’ He seemed to have struck a vein of words. ‘The sound of that fucking machine is the sound of your fucking brain.’ He slammed his fist onto the keys. The letters flew up and twisted together. Before she could assess the damage he shoved the typewriter off the desk. It fell on its side. The silver arm snapped off.
He spun and left the house, his movements not his own as he went down the ladder jerkily, as if someone were pulling him with strings. Once in their first month together in the field an Anapa elder had come to her and told her it was not safe for her to be alone with just her husband, and he offered to be her brother. At the time she and Fen had laughed about this. But she had needed a brother, it turned out. She had needed one with the Mumbanyo. She might still have her baby if she’d had a brother there.
She turned off the lamp and tried to sleep. Her heart was beating too fast. She took long breaths but it wouldn’t slow. She was scared he’d come back.
She got up and pulled on her filthy clothes. Wanji had not done the laundry since three days before Xambun arrived. There were fewer people on the beach than she had thought, only about fifty, some twenty people dancing and another thirty sprawled out around them. All the dancers were men, beads in their hair like Fen’s and special, ceremonial, elaborately curved penis gourds strapped on. The dance was all about these gourds, about making them leap and turn and thrust at the women, who lay about in groups half watching, bemused but sated, like men who’d been in a strip club too long. And there was Fen, in full costume, gyrating, clacking his gourd against his partner’s, his movements lacking the fluidity of the others. All the flute players had gone to bed, and the one man with a drum was listing to one side and slapping it only occasionally. A few women chanted or kept time with stones or sticks. Most lay with their heads close together talking, barely watching. Xambun was not there anywhere in the crowd.
The mood Fen had brought up to the house was magnified here. The celebration had turned. The men were tense, doped, some barely upright, others flinging themselves around as if trying to escape their own bodies. There seemed a muted desperation, not the building fury of a Mumbanyo ceremony when she feared they were seconds away from stabbing each other, not homicidal like that but suicidal, as if the women’s lack of interest and Xambun’s disappearance and the lack of rain were all their fault.
She sat beside a woman named Halana who passed her some kava and taro. She opened her notebook. It was the fifth night. She’d seen it all by now. There was nothing more to add. She heard Boas scolding her: Everything is material, even your own boredom; you never see anything twice—never think you’ve seen it before because you have not. I am working, she told herself, one of her tricks to re-see, see better, see beyond. Halana stared at her. She imitated Nell holding the pencil, chewing on its end, then pretended to eat the whole thing, which sent her friends into gales of laughter.