same reason your mother, the writer, once lost yours. She tried to take advantage of your relationship for certain unworthy, short-term ends.”
“Monicah, is that what you think I’ve done?”
My daughter stared at me, virtually unseeing.
“She’s possessed, Mr. Kampa. You woke her before she could sleep off the effects of her trance.”
“You’ve drugged her!”
“With her full complicity, sir. In this state she communes across the years with her mother’s spirit. You never speak of her mother, Monicah says. For a while, then, I helped her become her mother.”
“Bring her back,” I commanded the Ugandan.
“Far better that we should go to her, Mr. Kampa. Surely you’ll take this opportunity to touch the spirit of your habiline wife?”
I glared at the man. The winter I had returned from the States to Zarakal, Thomas Babington Mubia had taken me to the world of ngoma by way of a Wanderobo incantation. There he had formally married my spirit to that of his dead Kikembu wife, Helen Mithaga, whom he believed a twentieth-century avatar of my Pleistocene bride. Later that winter Babington had died, but as far as I was concerned, Helen and I were linked forever, legally as well as emotionally, and my former mentor’s impromptu rite had formalized our bond even in the Here and Now.
“Did you truly love Helen, Mr. Kampa, or was your dalliance with her a matter of rut and propinquity?”
“Bring my daughter back and then get out of here!”
“Forgive me,” Dirk Akuj said. “Of course you truly loved Helen, and you would like to commune with her again.”
“Listen!” I barked. “Listen, you miserable—”
“But you do, sir. You do wish to commune with your long-dead wife, and I can help you do that.”
My resolve weakened and, intuitively recognizing that he had beaten me, he headed for the door: Dirk Akuj, a Karamojong physicist with ingrained animist sympathies. He invited Timothy Njeri and Daniel Eunoto into the suite, arguing that the participation of one of these two men would help me achieve a harmonious relationship with the ghost in Monicah’s body. The other security agent would stand aloof from the ceremony as an observer, a control. This arrangement would free us from the worry that I was utterly in Dirk Akuj’s power. However, neither Timothy nor Daniel looked eager to take part in this scheme. They awaited some word from me, but all I could do was stare bewilderedly at the girl on the bed.
Dirk Akuj crossed to his tuxedo jacket and removed from an inside pocket a pair of plastic bags containing what appeared to be leaf cuttings and roots. He opened the bags, shook their contents into the teakettle on the hotplate, replenished the water in the kettle from a bathroom faucet, turned on the hotplate, and decocted this potion for a good five minutes, all the while humming a tuneless melody. A pungent odor rose into the air with the steam from the kettle’s spout, a smell like minty ammonia.
Timothy and Daniel flipped a coin to see who would act as observer. The coin came up heads (President Tharaka’s), and Daniel retreated to the door to watch.
After stripping to his T-shirt and briefs and urging Timothy and me to do likewise, Dirk Akuj showed us how we should empty our lungs and inhale deeply of the fumes from the kettle. We followed his advice. Then the three of us sat down in a triangle in the center of the room and began drumming our knees with our knuckles. The steam in the open kettle on the floor focused our attention, and soon the hotel was blinking in and out of existence in time with our drumming. Monicah gazed down on our ceremony as if from a great height. She seemed to blink in and out of existence on the off-beats.
I closed my eyes and time ceased to have any conventional meaning. History had been repealed, the future indefinitely postponed.
Then I opened my eyes and beheld around me a grayness pulsing with the promise of light. I was alone, but in a place with neither substance nor dimension. My hands had no body, my body no hands. Then a door swung inward, and my long-lost Helen was standing in this doorway, radiant in an immaculate white dress and apron. She was even wearing shoes. Her feet looked enormous in shoes, like monument pedestals. Tears freshened my cheeks, and I hurried to draw her out of the pale rectangle of the doorway.
“You shouldn’t be wearing these,” I told Helen, kneeling in