up high at the lip of a cliff. Suddenly the lights plunged over the top, bounced down the first incline. The truck careened over the next lip and picked up speed. I thought at first it was a man alone in the driver’s seat. But a young woman sat beside him, slid over on the seat all the way next to him. Her mouth was partway open, as though she was too terrified to scream.
“I don’t remember the truck turning over until it was upside down in water. Their heads were underwater, upside down.”
“God,” said Ian. “What was all that about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you and I all right?”
She looked at him as though she was trying to make up her mind. “Yes.” The air after the rain felt newly scrubbed, a faint smell of wet dog.
He kissed her on the mouth. “I’m sorry to upset you.”
She touched the top of his arm with two fingers, tentatively, down, up, down. They got back under the sheet together. Her body felt familiar and kind to him, then ravishing, an eloquence of heat, strange and lovely.
Afterward, they lay together, sweaty. He asked, “Remember Ginsberg?”
“Hmmm?” Her eyes were closed.
He crooned in her ear. “The world is holy! The skin is holy!”
“People don’t use that word anymore.”
“Holy?”
“It’s a good word.”
Later, they ate what Berndt called “a proper English breakfast.” Fried tomatoes, fried sausages, fried bread, eggs over lightly, toast with jam. Boom Boom was nowhere in sight. After breakfast, they went for a walk; then Ian worked on a paper he was writing on geometrics for the Center for World Indigenous Studies. Alice read a trashy novel that she’d found lying in a corner of the room. Late in the afternoon, they crept into bed again.
She’d planned to leave that afternoon—she’d asked to meet with Gaborone’s chief of police the next morning at eight—but she decided to get up early to give them one more night together. She told Ian she was anxious about the meeting with the police chief.
That evening, she wasn’t hungry when the food came. Ian ate pork chops and mashed potatoes and half of her dinner. She poked at a pile of glazed carrots, garnished with parsley. Ian drank a Castle Lager and before he’d finished one glass, asked for another. Vaguely, she wondered if he was an alcoholic. Two glasses didn’t add up to anything, but then he had a third, and finished up half of hers before they stood up and made their way back to the room. Drink had made him garrulous. His noisy intelligence spilled out, his large, affectionate hand swept around her waist. She felt vaguely irritated.
He was large in every way. It wasn’t out of ego that he took up so much space, she thought, although sometimes it felt that way. It was out of enthusiasm, his own commotion and curiosity about life. She wouldn’t wish that away, not for a moment. In bed, he asked how did a seer know the whereabouts of a herd of game? In traditional cultures, he said, people recognized the importance of those liminal, in-between states. But the more “civilized” a culture became, the less reverence people had for strangeness and ambiguity. The time he’d gone through to the other side, he’d seen his grandfather coming toward him. So strange, so beautiful, he murmured. He was practically weeping, telling her.
She put her arms around him and held him. His heart beat fast, as though he was in the grip of some urgency. He went to sleep all at once, as though someone had hit him over the head with a rock. She lay beside him and watched him for a while, exhausted, as though she’d been half consumed. In that fire, though, something had taken hold of her, a love she couldn’t really account for. She thought of the world he loved: where the wind harbored words that foretold danger; footsteps disappeared in storms of sand; animals and people changed shape; mirages appeared and flickered into nothing; invisible stars sang. What she knew was that with him, the world was large, chaotic, and generous; without him, small and starved and, somehow, wrong.
She woke at three thirty without the alarm and propped herself up on one elbow. Ian was lying on his back, his mouth partway open. His face, for the first time, looked old to her. His hair was thrown around the pillow. One hand was fisted near his cheek, the other open at his groin. Her heart went