with a rope of foam and vaulted into the fig tree. Alfie, Roosevelt, and Mister Pibb pursued him aloft. While the remaining Minids hooted at these inept brachiators, I went to Helen, lifted her to her feet, and led her back down the hillside to our tent.
By this diversion I had saved my mirror.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw the branches of the fig tree dripping with boas of evocative whiteness, almost as if it had snowed in this arid equatorial region of prehistoric Zarakal. A moment later the Minids came charging into New Helensburgh after us, releasing fluorocarbons into the Pleistocene atmosphere and plastering the cracks in our hut with shaving cream.
All that night the odor of decaying limes hung in the air, scenting our citadel, and in the morning the lumps of lather decorating our huts had taken on the honeycombed appearance of bleached and abandoned wasp nests. As for the can of shaving cream, I found it a day or two later in the branches of a small euphorbia bush at the bottom of the hill. Just as I had led Genly into accidental suicide, I had led his compatriots into the temptations of littering and aerosol warfare. C’est la vie.
* * *
Helen and I kept up our language lessons. The mirror, which earlier had enabled me to confirm the forward placement of her reproductive organs, continued to prove a valuable aid. Unfortunately, its principal value lay in maintaining Helen’s interest, for she could not properly shape the words I tried to teach her, and her acquisition of an English vocabulary had stalled at ten or eleven words. Love, if you do not count pronouns, was the only abstract term among this number, but whether she recognized its possibilities as a verb, too, I am not yet ready to declare. She could parrot a sentence I had taught her containing this word, however, and I have often consoled myself on melancholy nights by pretending that she knew exactly what she was doing.
The sentence?
Why, “I love you,” of course. I do not record it as Helen actually pronounced it because such a transcription would give the sentence a comic cast. Although I am not totally without humor regarding my relationship with Helen, in this instance I do not like to provoke your laughter. All of us cherish certain memories, and Helen’s distinctive phrasing of the words “I love you” is one of mine.
Chapter Seventeen
Pensacola, Florida
July 1985
JOSHUA CAREERED THROUGH FIVE O’CLOCK TRAFFIC on his battered red Kawasaki, leaning first this way and then that, the beach a stinging blur of whiteness to his left and, when too many automobiles and campers blocked the asphalt, the sandy right-hand shoulder of the highway—his private corridor to Pensacola. He was dirty, sweat- and paint-stained, but if he tried to stop by the trailer for a change of clothes and a bite to eat, he would probably miss Blair’s arrival at the auditorium. He had to get there not merely in time to hear the Great Man’s opening remarks, but early enough to waylay him outside the building and let him know that Blair was not the only expert on East African Pleistocene ecology in the Florida panhandle. Joshua Kampa—a.k.a. John-John Monegal—was another, an expert with no formal training but a great deal of eyewitness experience. Indeed, he had convinced himself that his entire previous life had been pointing him toward this meeting with Blair.
Alistair Patrick Blair, the noted hominid paleontologist from the African state of Zarakal.
Weaving in and out of traffic, Joshua repeated the name almost as if it were an incantation, a mantra: Alistair Patrick Blair, Alistair Patrick Blair, Alistair Patrick Blair . . . By repeating the name to himself he convinced himself of the reality of the man’s visit and of the inevitability of his meeting Blair. The chant emptied his mind of every distraction, every possible impediment to his goal. The Kawasaki, at the bidding of some implacable Higher Power, was directing itself to Pensacola. . . .
Three days ago Joshua had read in the News-Journal that Blair was going to speak tonight at one of the local high schools. To raise funds for his researches at Lake Kiboko in the Northwest Frontier District of Zarakal, he was in the United States under the auspices of the American Geographic Foundation for a series of public lectures. This stop in Pensacola, a city not on his original itinerary, was reputedly owing to his friendship with an American military man