OUTSIDE THE CHANCERY, A QUEUE OF AROUND two dozen people, mostly men from sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and central China, seemed to be standing with remarkable poise. Few of them came from places wealthy enough to implement the Seoul International Open-Comm Accords, which made WikiNous flesh-implantation a human right. Consequently, almost none of them understood what was going on in the rest of London. When the gorilla and elephant—and something else—entered the square, they froze.
But it wasn’t composure. It was terror.
“Dà x?ngx?ng!” a Chinese woman finally began screaming, and a clamor of cries and shouts followed. “Dà xiàng!”
Suleiman Ghailani had been sitting upon his “Ghana Must Go” bag,* as some of his queue mates kept calling the huge plaid nylon tote, which contained all his possessions on earth. These mostly comprised secondhand clothes from charities in Zanzibar whose supply of ugly, ancient polyester clothes from Kentucky and Bavaria was apparently inexhaustible. (The world had plenty of T-shirts and garish jumpers for Africa, Suleiman had discovered, long ago. To Zanzibari eyes, the old prebiodegradable fibers seemed to last decades longer than the inscrutable fashions they chased. There were things more injurious than poverty. Who in the world needed tight purple leggings with twelve zippered pockets?) There were also a pair of very weathered Reverend Awdry’s Railway Series books to help him learn English (the haughty blue engine, Gordon, made him laugh), and two packages of his cherished ballpoint pens, which he had purchased prematurely (and expensively) upon arrival at Heathrow. He planned to post the pens back to his father and young sisters in Tanzania as soon as he finally made it to America. (No one attached to the WikiNous/Opticall web used pens or pencils, but the poorest parts of the world treated them with reverence.) He would put a crisp, new $500 note in the letter, too, as he had seen done in the kung fu movies everyone in Tanzania watched on the old electric dalla-dalla buses. Once safe in the USA, he was going to make his family feel big.
When he saw the first animals, he leaped up to his feet and backed against one of the Portland stone columns that helped support the chancery’s facade. He was shocked. There were no gorillas on Zanzibar—the only primates left were a few colobus monkeys tourists paid to see in special reserves he himself had never cared to visit. As a young child, he had seen some of the last of the wild elephants, and like most East Africans, he respected the tembo more than any other creature, even simba, the lion—also now extinct in the wild.
After a moment, Suleiman stepped forward, toward the tembo. If he could attract the animals’ attention, it might save lives.
“Fee amaan Allah,” he whispered. “Inshallah.”
Suleiman was very bright, but in coming to London he had catastrophically depended on someone who turned out to be unreliable, and now he was down to his last ￡400, staying in a B&B, and filled with anguish. He was supposed to have stayed with a very religious acquaintance from the neighboring island of Pemba, a man named Abbas who lived in Finsbury Park and attended the Aga Khanian mosque there. But Abbas, strangely, had disappeared, and when Suleiman had knocked on his flat door, a bearded young Pakistani man in a long linen prayer shirt answered and smugly told him that Abbas had disappeared into hell. He never explained what that meant.
“Brother,” Suleiman had said. “I am lost.”
The man smiled and nodded knowingly. “Come back tomorrow and I will give a new way of life. You need to hear our imam. He’s friends with the Caliph Aga Khan, you know? He’s like no one you’ve ever heard. He will help you, rafiki.”
A fanatic, Suleiman thought.
So Suleiman had changed course; all the Africans he had met in London—nearly all from West Africa—urged him to “visit” New York City and simply overstay the “leave to remain” passport stamp. You could hide in Queens or Newark forever. The rest of America could be safely ignored.
“Go to the Big Apple, my nigga,” a fat path-manager from Lagos had said, laughing his head off. “I’m going back next week just to buy some new shoes. This London—it’s five thousand percent rip-fucking-rippa-dip-dip-rip-off!”
The elephant very pointedly stopped and faced the visa applicants. Suleiman turned and saw several of them try to squeeze behind the column. But it was hopeless. Too many people, too little protection.