I Bleed Lilac and Heartache

“Your arm will look very bad,” the nurse declared, her head turned toward the door of the consultation room. It had been five days since my spectacular fall from a moving bus, and my body tensed at the mention of any lasting damage. I wanted to believe I didn’t hear her right.

“My arm,” I asked weakly, having propped it up awkwardly on the operating tray. My palm was flat against the aluminum pan and my punctured elbow was suspended lopsidedly in the air like a grizzled old flag.

“Your arm will look very bad after I apply this,” she said, alluding to a small vial in her hand. “It will turn the color of your shirt.”

I breathed out slightly. I was wearing a maroon dress shirt over a pair of gray slacks and nodded as she turned to face me. "At least it will match.”

Christine, my nurse, approached the table holding a wad of gauze the color of fresh lavender. She wore her hair twisted back in two thick braids and had a dark birthmark over her right eye that looked almost like a bruise. It reminded me of my ex-stepmom who had a birthmark in nearly the same place, and my dad, who lamented having to constantly face down stares from strangers who assumed he had hit her. Christine’s face looked young—not much older than my own—and had a sweetness to it, like she had trained to become a nurse because she genuinely liked people. Her smile, when I got her to laugh, was broad and unashamed.

It was the second time I had met her. The first was just hours after the accident, when I ambled into the university medical center after lunch, my arm held together loosely with a sheet of cling wrap and some adhesive. She flushed out the wound with peroxide and bandaged it in a cloth brace that gave my forearm the appearance of a taut bicep.

The medicine she prescribed was called Gentian Violet. When I asked her, she said she didn’t know about the ingredients of GV so much as she did its effect: it stains everything purple. Using the lavender gauze, she pressed down on my exposed skin. Each pulse sent a surge of pain through my arm but it was tempered by the restraint she showed, like she knew exactly how much pressure to administer. Her hands, when she was through soaking the wound, adopted the same amethyst glow as my forearm, like we had been through something together.

“It doesn’t look so bad,” I said, staring at the fresco with water lilies painted across my lower arm.

“The GV will help the wound scab,” Christine replied, washing her hands in the sink. “Or did you want to look that tough forever?”

I admitted to her that I half-liked the feeling of having a big open gash on my arm. It wasn't bravado so much as it was stating a fact. On a crowded street, at any time of day, I was confident that no one was going to give me trouble.  

Next, she drew her attention to my shoulder. “And now for your tetanus shot.”

I was already pushing a week since the date of the injury and it was the last time I could get the shot for it to still be effective. In a few hours, I would board a night bus to Busia, a small town bordering Uganda in the west of the country and would not be back in Nairobi for five more days. It was a combination of work and time off, culminating with a full day of white water rafting on the Nile. I thought about my arm and how it would fare being tossed around and roughed up by Class 5 rapids, and then, just as quickly, about how much worse I would feel if I didn’t go.

Unable to roll the sleeve of my shirt up past my shoulder, I began unbuttoning it, slowly at first, because I wasn’t familiar with the cultural norms, and, moreover, because I wasn’t sure if Christine would object to my getting undressed in her office. With the door closed and my eyes fixed on Christine, I unbuttoned my still-tucked shirt to the waist and hoisted the fabric over my left shoulder so that the entire left half of my torso was exposed. She didn’t bat an eye the entire time.

I waited as she unsealed a package of the vaccination and walked over to my left side. “This will feel a little funny,” Christine said, before piercing the needle into my shoulder and pushing down on the plunger.

When she was done, I asked her if she could log the shot in the yellow book that I used to record all of my immunizations, the very same one I had been given at the travel clinic in Elyria when I first got my vaccinations for China. She wrote it down in the blank directly below the previous entry—a tetanus shot dated just over two years ago. I remembered the incident almost immediately—having to get seven stitches in my chin at a county hospital in China after doing something even more illogical than jumping out of a moving vehicle. I looked over at her signature and the one next to my shot from China, and imagined that every two years I might record another tetanus shot from a new far-flung destination – like a repository of my misadventures.

“You know, I told you to buy the GV two days ago,” Christine said as she handed the yellow book back to me and saw me to the door. “Your arm would have already scabbed by now. Why haven’t you bought it yet?” She had a teasing quality to her voice, but I could tell she asked me the question in earnest.

“I couldn’t find any chemists,” I replied back, the East African equivalent of pharmacies, which was a lie, since I pass more than three on my walk home from work every day.

She scoffed and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Why do I even bother with you,” she spouted, a bit of her Swahili accent coming out. And I could already see a smile forming at the creases of her mouth.

“I’m the worst kind of patient,” I admitted, rising to my feet. “But that’s why I need your help even more.”

On the overnight trip to Busia, I woke up every time our bus came to a screeching, juddering stop, or the woman next to me bumped her elbow against my arm. I never thought it was intentional but the roads for nearly all ten hours were atrocious and for most of the ride we couldn’t help colliding into each other. At times I felt like we were intentionally off-roading, that there was a perfectly smooth highway running parallel to the dirt road, but that our headlong driver insisted on using the bumpy, eroded path, the bus itself throbbing with African music blaring out of the overhead speakers. In the moments when I was jolted awake, I looked out the tinny glass windows and saw a dense fog encompassing my entire field of view, ours the single pair of headlights cutting through the haze.

At other times, I looked over at the woman to my right. She had a small frame and folded up neatly in the reclining chair; her entire body fit effortlessly into her seat. She had remarkably cool features: round oval eyes, wavy black hair, skin as dark and smooth as dawn. And irrationally, I kept thinking about how nice it would be to edge up to her, to bury my head in her shoulder, to wrap my arms tightly around her and not let go. I missed Alexandra, missed the bus trips we took together while traveling, and how at certain points she would just slump her body against mine and I would hold her there for as long as it took to get to wherever we were going. I thought back to the afternoon at Christine’s office and how before her it had been a long time since anyone had applied me with even the slightest touch.

It was almost 3:00 in the morning when our bus pulled into a rest stop. The bus stopped perhaps ten or twelve times before our eventual arrival in Busia at 5:30, sometimes just to let a person on or off, and at other times to idle in a lot while passengers went inside to get food, stretch their legs, or use the bathroom. Not knowing when we would arrive, I crawled off the bus, my body aching from being pounded and jostled against the seat, and my arm on fire.

The rest area was a cavernous den replete with a few lopsided restaurants and a bar still pumping music well into the early morning. It was nearly pitch black inside and my vision was still fuzzy from the bus ride. In an almost ethereal state, I walked along a checker-tiled floor and saw a group of four men sitting to a candlelit dinner at a table outside of a closed restaurant, their hands joined and their faces bowed so that I couldn’t make out any of their expressions.

When I reached the bathroom, my eyes first settled on my arm in the mirror. The GV had set in and, as promised, the wound began to scab, taking on the flat, crispy texture of a Terra chip cut from blue potatoes. Then, instinctively, my eyes settled on the center of my chest, where there was a gaping space in my shirt where a button should have been fastened. I rubbed my eyes and stared again. Sure enough, the buttons to my shirt were mismatched. I wondered how I could have possibly let this detail escape me, and then it dawned on me.

Standing in the rest stop bathroom, I remembered buttoning up my shirt in Christine's office, giving pause at the last thing she told me before I left. “You should come back and visit me,” she said, “even after your arm is healed.”

Lesser Acts of Daring

My stunt fall could use more work. Though in my defense, I hadn’t exactly planned for it.

The objective: jump out of a moving bus on the way to work. This bus won’t be going to Silver Springs, the conductor said, of the route I had been commuting on for close to a week with no such discrepancy. You’ll have to get off here. “Here,” as it happened, was less a definable location than it was any number of points along a dusty city road. Despite it being morning, the bus was careening down at a pace I thought only reserved for the midday traffic lull in Nairobi. It slowed as we approached a roundabout, but we were still going about 25 MPH when the conductor opened the front door and beckoned me onto the steps. Now.

Two years ago, I learned the best way to jump out of a moving vehicle. A retired stuntman was being interviewed on a radio show, and when asked about such a situation, he replied that the best thing to do is to jump at an angle away from the vehicle, to try and land in a soft spot away from the pavement, to avoid obstructions if at all possible, to tuck your body into a ball, hit the ground with your shoulder, and roll.

It’s hard to say whether I was pushed or if I jumped out willingly, like there was some deviant inner force spurring me on. It reminded me of when I went gorge jumping in Ithaca, how my body felt when it touched off the ground, the seconds of free-fall where time stood still, the almost-relief of finally plunging into the water 70 feet below. There was that initial terror of running to the cliff edge, of defying my mind’s desperate, incessant pleas to stop, and of feeling the earth leave my bare feet.

I saw a gruesome accident on my last day in New York. It was midday, sweltering, and at the intersection of Houston and Broadway a cab clipped the side of a motorcycle. The motorcyclist lost control and fell, his bike skidding on hot asphalt across the median. A group of stunned onlookers—myself included—stood paralyzed until one man came forward and helped the driver to his feet. The man had a long scrape down his right arm, red and ashen like volcanic ash, but did not look terribly shaken. The two of them guided the bike back to the stoplight, and the driver, with beleaguered breath, pushed the helmet back over his head, revved up the engine, and sped off.

By the time I got to my feet, I actually felt a little relieved that the bus I was riding on had not stopped, but rather, had continued circling the roundabout and disappeared out of sight. At a bar last night, two Kenyan MCs were hosting a talent night, a raucous and wildly entertaining affair that saw scores of young East African men and women singing, dancing, and performing stand-up comedy. At one point, the MCs started giving away free tickets to an event to be held the following week, but only to foreigners, seemingly only on account of their whiteness. This treatment was nothing startling. In China, you could get away with almost anything as a foreigner. Evidently perhaps, that preferential treatment was true here as well.

At the side of the road, there were only a handful of stares from passengers in approaching buses, and no pedestrians on the street stopped to confront me. I dusted myself off and set off in the direction of a nearby gas station. There was a gash in my sweatshirt where my elbow had made contact with the ground and a long scrape down my right arm. I thought about the motorcyclist on Houston Street. I was just another person in a traffic accident. I could have been anyone.

Grifters, Scams, and Salvation

Picture a beautiful beach—cloudless sky, white sand, waves undulating like teeth on a jigsaw. Now, populate it with tourists. Not too many, but enough to keep the local boys on their game. There are a few overweight Brits sipping mimosas by the bar, bikini-clad ladies sunbathing near the shore, two guys on boogie boards that were first in the water. Next, add a group of backpacking foreigners on only their third day in Kenya. Look at their bright eyes, their jubilant expressions. Marvel at their surprise at the sight of the ocean.

Now, look closer. See that one in the back, carrying a drawstring bag with books and sunscreen he won't actually use? He’s got his fancy camera pressed up to his nose and his legs crouched, trying to take the perfect shot. Focus now, this part is absolutely crucial. See him slow down from the rest of his group just a step. Now two. Now three. Enough to allow for some distance. That’s when you pounce, Ali. That’s when you make your move.

*

When Ali approached me, he started in with Obama, hakuna matata, and how we are all “one people.” At first, I was convinced that he was mildly autistic and begrudgingly played along, but it didn’t take long for me to revel at having connected with a local. After a few more minutes, Ali and I were flanked by another boy, a brash young Kenyan probably no older than sixteen. He was wearing board shorts, a Rasta-inspired polo, and a pair of cheap sunglasses, and introduced himself as Solomon. “My African name is Suleman,” he explained, “but Westerners have a hard time pronouncing it.” Sunglasses or not, Suleman had a terrible poker face; for the entire length of our exchange, he couldn't stop grinning like an idiot.

The con was textbook in its simplicity. The moment I was out of earshot of the rest of the group, Ali and Suleman started in about how there were no jobs on the coast for young people, that both of them were orphans, and that they were desperate to provide for themselves without turning to violent crime. Ali explained that they sold handicrafts—carved keychains in the shapes of animals. “Wouldn’t you like to see one?” he asked. “Only 500 shillings each.” And in those fleeting minutes, when I gave up hemming and haranguing and eventually conceded the money to Ali, the boy took off. “I’ll be right back with the keychain,” he promised, shouting into the wind.

At the time, I don’t know why I didn’t try to go after Ali, but it was like I had been paralyzed. As his figure gradually retreated from view, I still couldn’t really believe what had transpired. Finally, when it became abundantly clear that he wasn’t going to return, Suleman tried to level with me. With nary an ounce of regret or repentance in his voice, he said, “like it or not, some of us need to hustle to survive.” And just then, as a new group of foreigners descended on the sandbank, he began to get antsy. His legs started moving before his mouth did. “I’ve got to work, my brother,” he told me, “I just have to.” And pretty soon he too was gone.

The whole episode reminded me of the time when Anne and I were approached by a grifter on our last day in India. It’s a story I reference constantly—the cherry on top of a putrid, melting sundae that seemed to define nearly every experience and encounter I had in the country, and the proof to show what a miserably hard place Delhi is to live in. What I regret most about that exchange, though, is not how everything unfolded with the scam, but how I reacted to it afterward.

I know it wasn’t fair to blame Anne, but I did it just the same—emphasizing in the subsequent retellings how it was her naiveté and her money, and lauding myself on how attune I was to the whole situation from the beginning. But the reality was much more complicated than that. Knowing only what you know, how do you turn down someone you have made a connection with? In a moment of vulnerability, how do you so coolly reject another human being?

*

The next day the four of us went to Kaya Forest, a sacred site once home to nine of the indigenous tribes of Africa. It was about a half-hour journey away from our guesthouse by tuk-tuk, a slow puttering ride down gravelly back roads. On the ride there, we passed boutique four-story hotels and elegant Western cafes, interspersed with corrugated tin dwellings and huts made of straw and grass. The people we passed along the road alternated between stone-faced indifference and avid enthusiasm. Weathered men holding pitchforks glowered at the four foreigners crammed in the backseat, while small children crooned a fevered jambo and waved as our three-wheeler chugged past them in a plume of smoke.

When we reached Kaya Forest, we were led to a small visitor’s center and instructed to sit down along a row of neatly arranged plastic chairs. In front of us stood a tall man with graying hair and a bushy beard. “My name is Suleman,” he said, “and I will be your guide for the afternoon.” My eyes grew wide at the mention of his name. He in no way resembled the Suleman I had met on the beach a day prior, but the wound was still raw, and I didn’t yet know what to make of him. Perhaps sensing some discomfort, Suleman looked me dead in the eyes when he spoke, like he was searching my face for marks of latent trauma.

Suleman led us out to the forest and started with a brief history of the region. The indigenous tribes left Kaya Forest in the late 19th century, but for the last decade, the site had been maintained as a conservation project with the support of a few local and international NGOs. Many of the trees in the forest were listed on the endangered species red list, but even then, some of them were being decimated by invasive species. “Some people think we should start cutting down the Ficus Benjamina for instance,” Suleman said, of a parasitic fig plant that chokes out its host, germinates its own flowers, and puts its own roots down in the ground. But Suleman didn’t agree. “It’s the cycle of life,” he explained. “It’s nature. And nature can’t be stopped.”

Suleman pointed to one tree whose bark was used in ancient times to make clothing for tribal men. The bark needed to be scraped from the tree in long scathes, boiled in batches and then pounded repeatedly with a hammer to become pliable enough to be stitched together. Suleman told us that these cloth trees had another purpose—they were also used for prayer. Elders considered them auspicious and used the trees to pray for rain, for the prevention of disease, for a fertile season. He invited each of us to pray for something in our own lives.

At Suleman’s insistence, we each went up in turns to the cloth tree, hugged it around the waist like a lover, and said a prayer. Suleman was the first one up. He gave the tree a hulking bear hug and when he turned back to face us, he was beaming a smile of such genuine radiance that it heartened me just to look at him. The center of the tree had been hollowed out and was so smooth that it felt as if it had been sandblasted. When it was my turn, I pressed my face deeply into the wood so it was flush against my own skin and wrapped my arms tightly around its large trunk. I took a deep breath and whispered softly into it: I want to believe in people. I really do.

The Beginning

It could have been a scene out of a bad ‘80s movie. Men in high-waisted khakis sporting bad mustaches, standing in front of airport duty free shops lined with whitewashed cartons of Marlboro Reds. Old Coca-Cola ads proclaiming that there are “A Billion Reasons to Believe in Africa” and Citibank posters of half-clothed African bushmen that instruct onlookers that the word “rafiki” is Swahili for friend.

In the cab on the way out of the airport, the streets all looked like Taigu's—massive dirt roads undercut with uneven cobblestone paving and highway arteries clogged with cars passing indiscriminately over the median. The two hours of nearly standstill traffic today were to be blamed on incompetent police officers, said my taxi driver, a dark, big-bellied man named Saidie. “If they would just let the lights do their job, we wouldn’t have any problems,” he shouted over the blaring Swahili broadcast of the Nairobi-Kenya World Cup qualifier on the car stereo. Traffic runners, quick to capitalize on the immobilized passengers, showed off their wares—bags of mangoes, top-up phone cards, newspapers, head towels, throw rugs. Saidie waved a dull hand and rolled up his window. There were many things that I wanted to ask him—like why he had traveled to Iran, and which mobile service provider offered the best rates—but I could tell he had a lot riding on the match, and I thought it best that we just listen.

Safety is more of a concern here than I imagined. The reality according to nearly everyone I spoke to is that you can’t go out without a taxi past sundown. Even a one-minute walk from the Fellows apartment to an Italian restaurant across the street for dinner proved tense. A big group of mzungu is always the easiest target to hit. Once past the barbed-wire gate and a pat-down reminiscent of the old TSA, candles were lit and big logs were set on a pyre for outdoor dining. The waiter brought over four menus to share, and pretty soon the eight of us were sharing toasts of Prosecco over bowls of linguine and parmesan.

At dinner we talked of sneaky pick-pockets, robberies at gunpoint, bodies thrown from an overnight bus after a roadside collision. I got up to use the bathroom and asked a leery man at the front of the kitchen where it was. He looked me up and down before pointing a finger towards the back of the restaurant. His eyes were shaded from the dark, and he looked like the drivers we had passed on the way in, unrecognizable through small cars with burned-out headlights as they crept along the empty streets. I caught the eye of the man again on my way back to my table. I paced him for a few steps before he stopped dead in his path and turned around to face me. “Hi,” he said, and I responded back in kind, as if, ultimately, we each needed to be clear of the other's intentions.

Revelations

The 2 train wasn't crowded, and I must have looked more approachable than usual, seeing as how I had gone five or six months away from the city and my “what-the-fuck-are-you-looking-at” stare reserved for subway cars and all other public venues was severely out of practice, because the man started talking to me right away.

“You lookin' good, young man,” he crooned across the train. He started making smacking noises with his lips like he had just bitten into something tasty. His mouth shuddered as he spoke, and his teeth looked like loose piano keys that could drop out at any moment. He was sitting at the far edge of a short gray bench—the kind that fold up against the wall when no one is using them—with a paper bag set horizontally across his lap.

“Thank you,” I replied, shedding my habit of humility. I had just finished seeing an old friend for lunch and was wearing a button-down shirt and a clean pair of jeans. I glanced quickly up and down the subway car to see if anyone else was watching.

The man leaned over and grinned at a dark-skinned woman seated to his left at the other end of the bench. She looked a little too skinny, like she could have been an actor in a diet pill infomercial on TV. Her hair was long and dread-locked and took on the grainy, ashen color of aluminum.

“He does, don't he?” the man said, eying the thin woman in the short crop top and hitched-up blue jeans.

“Yeah, he ain't half-bad,” she replied back, never once looking up from the floor. For a minute I thought that they were friends, but I realized that he had roped her into conversation the same way he had with me. His eyes danced over her body like pruning shears over a topiary.

“Let me ask you something, son. Do you work for a living?”

It was 2:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. I had a sinking feeling that he was going to ask me for money if I said yes. But if nothing else, I thought that he would at least be sympathetic to the plight of the city's jobless, so I wanted to level with him.

“No sir,” I told him with as much conviction as a door-to-door knife salesman.

We had just gone to a diner for lunch, my old friend and I. I had a spinach-and-cheese omelet and she had a plate of Belgian waffles. Were I to do it over, I would have offered to share part of my dish, but at the time it didn't quite feel right—like we weren't fully acquainted yet. In the three years since I'd seen her last, she had moved halfway across the world and back, and had driven 42 hours from Calgary to live in Brooklyn. And she was married.

“Because Jesus says that whoever don't work for a living don't deserve to live on this here earth,” the man said, fixing me with a toothy grin. I rocked back and forth against the door, as if that might preempt a conversation on the merits of God's word. The friend I had lunched with was Christian, though her new husband was Jewish. I fished in my bag for my book of Raymond Carver stories and stared absently at the sliding doors.

“You know what, though,” the man said, seemingly impervious to my reaction. “You probably wouldn't do so bad as a pimp.” He laughed and slapped his knee hard with the palm of his hand. I lowered the book from my face and stared back at the man on the bench.

“A pimp?” the woman next to him squealed, as if she found the appraisal patently ridiculous. “Well, I'm sure he don't have no trouble attracting girls at least.”

“Ain't no trouble at all,” the man crowed back. They were looking at each other across the bench and smiling these wide-toothed grins.

I asked my friend at lunch if it bothered her that her husband wasn't Christian. Or if it made her change her beliefs at all. I think I said something about cultural Jewishness and about how my dad was also Jewish so I kind of understood where her husband was coming from. I don't know why I said it. I guess I must have been nervous. It's strange not to see someone for a couple years and then find out that they'd gotten married. I thought it would be this inviolable wall between us, but it didn't actually feel that different.

“How about that, son?” the man turned to face me again, grabbing the paper bag with his right hand. “You goin' around attracting ladies or what?”

My friend said that her husband didn't change her beliefs so much as her friends and family. Her mom threatened not to show up for the wedding when she found out the news. Some of her old classmates were militant, telling her things like, “I hope you burn in hell for what you did” or “marrying a non-believer is a sin.” She said she didn't expect that from other Christians. She said that that made more of an impact on her than anything her husband could have said.

I was staring up at my book when he asked me again.

“Well, come on now. Are you attracting ladies or what?” He was wearing that big toothy grin again, like he was trying to imagine me in a velor jump suit and a striped cane. I thumbed the page and lowered the book to my chest.

“Sure, but no one's paying me for it or anything,” I shouted back over the rumble of the train. Nothing about it was true, but I guess I was trying to be funny or something. The man looked me up and down and then at the skinny woman to his left.

“Maybe that's not what you're really after then,” he said. He scooted up in his seat and tightened his hands around the paper bag. “Now excuse me while I drink.” The paper bag on the man's lap contained a bottle of rosé. I watched him as he tipped the pink liquid down his throat, illuminating his sunken cheeks.

The doors shot open at Eastern Parkway and the conductor's voice came in over the PA system.

“This is my stop,” the woman next to him said, rubbing her hands against her bare legs as she stood to get up. “You have a good day now.” She brushed past the man and slipped in between the doors. The whole time I watched her leave but her eyes never turned back to meet mine.

The man on the bench didn't say a word. He looked queerly at the bottle, then at me, and then gulped the remaining liquid down until there was nothing left. I squinted above the words to my book. I saw an empty seat at the other end of the car and I planned to walk over to it. I wanted to at least signal the man, but he was not looking at me anymore. His eyes were fixed to the reflective glass of the window, to the bottle in his hand and the peculiar pink hue that clung to his lips even after he finished his drink. 

The train rumbled out of the station. My life is going to change. I just know it.