He walks past. She is standing there, her hand held out to the merchant, giving money or receiving change. She looks out. He looks in. They see each other. Her heart flies out to him as every breath in his lungs sings out for her.  

Their souls touch.  

He looks ahead and keeps walking. She counts her change and walks out. He had disappeared. On the noisy, crowded, hot, uneven and cracked pavement she looks for that sight.  

Gone.  

She looks around the human wave moving up and down the hill. She looks left and looks right. He was nowhere. Where have I met him before, she wonders, hoping no taxi comes by before he appears again. She needs to reach home. The heat was killing her feet squeezed in tight Lebanese-made shoes.   

He tries on the pair of shoes he has saved for and buys them. Prices at Waterside are half of those on Randall Street, and a third of the prices on Broad Street, where the homeless children sleep in cartoon boxes in the shadows of glittering stores. Some of those selling in the shops had guns just ten months before. They roamed the market shooting, drinking and killing.   

Will she still be near that store? He takes his change, crosses Mechlin Street and looks around.   

Gone.   

Bizarre, he thinks. I am sure I have met her before. He looks up and down Mechlin Street and through the sweaty, yelling crowd of vendors and buyers and the horning taxis. The sun seems to be only a few yards overhead. He signals for a taxi and gets in. It was once a new car from Japan. Now it is rusting metal on four tires. One man is in the front seat and another man in the back. The taxi approaches the hill on Mechlin Street. The driver stops for another passenger.  

It’s her.   

She gets in the back and sits by the other window. Her legs are squeezed together by the passenger in the middle. On one side, the man and his wandering muscles pushing into her softness, and on the other side, sharp metal. She sees him. And then pretends.   

Painfully, the taxi climbs the Mechlin Street hill. The taxi engine was tired and coughed oily smoke. The radio was loud. The street was noisier. Waterside and its smells faded away. The inner city of Monrovia with its scent of decomposition took over, teasing and testing the senses.  

He can hardly believe she is in the same space. She is thinking, what is the chance that the taxi I get in would be this one?  

He looks at her. She looks out the window. Slow-moving sidewalk with its oppressive heat and sea of sweat. Water Street landings where boats and ships and canoes once took off for the settlements on the banks of the St. Paul River, to Brewerville, Clay Ashland and that town, up there, on the river, that gave birth to the Ghankay.    

He stares at her. She does not look past the mid-section of the car. His gaze returns to the open market Monrovia has slowly turned into, filled with plastic junk flowers and ceramic ashtrays from China and India. His shoes were made in Bangladesh. Her chocolate bar was made in Puerto Rico.  

The taxi moves up Broad Street and turns right into Randall Street. All around children run naked in search of excitement and bread. Moneychangers stand over stacks of millions of Liberians dollars that go for a few US bucks. He kicked them out of the Temple but they were here, two thousand years later.   

The bank at the corner of Broad Street and Randall Street is closed. Money launderers, drug kingpins and the guest of honor in the Executive Mansion are the new bankers.   

Next to the bank, the sign: KASSAS CLINIC. Dr. Kassas is dead. He came to Liberia a young Doctor from Lebanon. He aged as Liberia plunged into its abyss. Samuel Doe called him my father and used to bring the presidential convoy and block traffic on Randall Street while they exchanged jokes in his smoke-filled offices, with Lebanese merchants lined up to pay their respects.  

The hotel, El Meson, is a depot of ashes with burnt bodies buried under the rubble. Former child soldiers sit on the rubble, smoking fresh ganja from Bassa plantation and selling cold water in mini-plastic bags. Government and international functionaries drive by in their new, polished sport utility cars. Girls show their legs to passers-by.  

El Meson, with tiny rooms and showers so small that customers could only wash one part of their body at a time. The nightclub and the restaurant on the first floor had CNN on twenty-four hours, and the MTV hook-up where young hookers in their early teens with flat chests and red-lipstick covered lips hooked-up with international workers and sipped imitation Jack Daniels from Nigeria. El Meson, where pushers of handguns crashed on the couches waiting for undiscerning clients and the only currency was US dollars. One day, El Meson was blown into pieces while they all danced.   

The taxi stops in front of the Phillips Building on Randall Street. The building belonged to a cabinet minister who was executed in April 1980. His body was thrown in a mass grave.

He gets out of the taxi and pays his fare. He has his shoebox with the new pair under his arm. As the taxi takes off, she finally turns and looks at him. He is still looking at her. She asks the driver to stop. She gets out, pays her fare. She looks south and sees the Convent in the distance. She turns and walks toward him. He walks toward her. They meet halfway. The sea on the horizon and Waterside downhill, beyond Broad Street, invisible.   

He takes her hand and she squeezes his. She tells him her name and he tells her his. She feels his fingers wrapping around her hand and she wants him to hold her hand longer. Do I know you? Have we met before? It didn't matter.   

Her feet. She has to get home. She smiles and perspiration runs down her forehead into the valley of her eyes. She wipes it off. He wants to do it for her. He does not carry handkerchiefs. I hate them, she says, happy that he didn’t have one. Can I come home with you, he asks. They stop another taxi and negotiate. They will pay five dollars per hour.

They head south, and make a left turn on UN Drive. The UN was repairing potholes at the junction of Benson and Randall Streets. The UN controls Monrovia, Kakata, Bassa, Lofa, and every small town turned into a ghost town by the soldiers of doom.  

They talk. They pass BTC, the Barclay Training Center known for its post stockade, beautiful, white sandy beaches and torture chambers where dissidents and patriots wept blood for generations. On the beach, between BTC and the Atlantic, thirteen aging souls looking for a time of rest were sent into eternity, among them, a tall man, Cecil Dennis, and old man James A.A. Pierre.  

A market. They smile and talk. Up the hill and the police headquarters and the big house of knowledge burned down by flame-toting boys from the countryside who mistook books for firewood. They talk about meeting later as the taxi nears her home, on Tubman Boulevard.  

Her house. There is a mango tree in the yard. There is no chicken, cat or dog. There are children kicking a deflated soccer ball. He will come back to take her out. She had kissed him. Did she really? Or was she just saying goodbye? She stood there while the taxi sped into the smoke-filled traffic of the hot, late March afternoon. The sun was rushing home. It was too hot to stand anywhere in the sky.  

She says nothing to her sister who saw her kiss a total stranger in a taxi. She lays on her bed, looking at the ceiling fan that has not turned since she was a little girl, when child soldiers took over Monrovia and small boys with guns cut the electric wires to whip teachers. It happened in Kakata, Nimba, Grand Gedeh and every small hamlet in the land. The ceiling fan was covered with the thin, silvery lines of a spider web. She fell asleep and dreamt: tonight is the night.  

She walks into the bathroom, undresses and looks in the mirror. Is her left breast bigger than the right? It can’t be. God has a good sense of symmetry. Or maybe she always plays with the right one whenever . . .  

A bath with a bucket-full of water. Someday, maybe someone would bring water and she would soak in her bathtub like that girl in that American hip-hop video. Destiny?

No water has come through the pipes since little boys with bombs blew up the water plant in Mount Coffee to force Samuel Doe into exile. But Sammy did not go and he was cut into tiny little pieces with razor blades by angry Noah Bordello and his cohorts of angry Nimba fighters with the Prince overlooking, drunk on Budweiser and high on ganja grown in the plains of Bassa County.  

I need a haircut he thinks. Should I get a haircut before my bath or after? Wet hair doesn’t cut well. Maybe she likes my hair. He puts on his new pair of shoes. No, that would be for another day, another date. He would wear something comfortable tonight.

He feels happy for deciding against cutting his hair. That could have changed things. She would ask—or maybe not—why he cut his hair. Then he would wonder all night if she liked the hair of the afternoon or the new cut. Curly hair is straight when cut. He is an African boy with nappy, curly, jet-black hair. He will grow into an African man with gray, curly hair and not use Just For Men hair dye like his uncle buys every six weeks to look young.

His uncle says the warlords robbed him of his years of youth and wildness and now he has to catch up. They wounded him, his uncle says, like the rest of Liberia, the sweet little country so wounded in her soul that dolphins moved to the coast of Brazil to avoid the blood of angels spilled on the green tropical grass.  

He picks her up in a taxi. The nightclub. Music. Drinks. Dancing.

The children of war dance like Krahn warriors and Gio Devils. They copulate on the dance floor. They keep their drinks outside, in a dark corner, near the cigarette vendor. It is plain cane juice, from Clay Ashland, made to burn the brain. Every now and then, they go outside, take a sip and walk back into the club and dance. They dance as if they were dying. The music, colored lights and the scent of bodies hypnotize them.  

They dance. Talk. Laugh. My life, she thinks, this is my life. I can feel it. How can I do this and feel good and nervous and scared and excited at the same time? How is it possible? Why do I feel like I am jumping off a cliff with a storm pushing me from the back?  

She rests her head on his chest and counts his heartbeats. She feels good being there with him. He is taller but she can feel him. His fingers are long and her lips are full. His hands run over her hips as they dance. Her breasts feel nice against him. He likes the scent of her hair. Something exhilarating enters his soul. Her movements captivate him. He remembers his first sight of her in that oppressive heat on Waterside, where Lebanese merchants dump East Asian plastic junk products on alienated, imitating Liberians . . .  

The last call awakes them from their sensual, slow dance lethargy. The DJ says, go out and get merrier! May your senses carry you where you have never been!  

They leave the club. The children of war are still in streets. Girls on Broad Street, boys on Gurley Street and boys and girls together at the corner of Carey and Gurley Street, down the road from Holiday Inn, near where Heinz & Maria once served coffee and donuts to diamond traffickers and Mandingo elders with gold dust in their pockets making deals. Now the children of war have taken over the darkness of the city. They sell everything. They do anything.  

Stalls are packed up and the merchants are gone. Drivers with bundles of dollar notes stop at street corners and whistle. They drive slowly. The children of war know them. The drivers stop in dark corners, then they look out, then they wave. The children of war, one-two-three-four get in the cars. For a can of outdated Moroccan sardines, a shelter for the night, a few dollars and they are gone. They sell themselves for a fistful of rice or a few dollars and a bed for a few hours before daybreak.

The streets are dark. Street lamps on Benson, Clay, Johnson, Buchanan and Randall streets all blind for decades, their wires shipped to Lagos or Accra or Danane. They walk in the darkness.

The women of the war pass by wearing heavy red lipstick and short skirts and heavy perfumes. I need to feed my babies, they seem to scream, babies of warlords and peacekeepers. Babies of faceless and shadowy men with sweat in their hairy armpits. The women of the war don’t speak, they simply acquiesce to anything asked of them. Anything. Prostitution once had a price in Monrovia. Sex was once a pleasure in this land. A smile was once from the heart.

Center Street and the cemetery, cleaned once a year when those who sleep peacefully are remembered. They look at the graves. The moon casts gigantic shadows on tombstones. They hold hands and walk.

At the southern tip of the graveyard, the Center Street graveyard, there is that space, green with grass, grass grown out of fertilizing human flesh. On April 14, 1979, hundreds were buried there. They wanted rice and they were fed bullets and buried by Caterpillar like dead dogs in a land possessed by madness. Joe and Jenny and other children of the Rice Riots who smashed windows on Broad Street and looted camera stores are buried there. And on April 29, 1980, Tolbert, William, a Baptist minister, and thirteen others.

There. With no clothes and no hearts. And for the next ten years, 350,000 unclaimed bodies were eaten by dogs who were eaten by survivors who were killed by children with AK-47s.

He wants to say something to her. She wants to ask a question. They are already there. They walk into his room. She has not said yes. She has not said no. He has not asked. Love is tender moments with sex. A kiss, a touch, a smile and a deeper kiss will seal what they know they have to consume.

His room has a window on the ocean where the Atlantic brings in the soft breeze of the night. They are naked. He does not turn the lights on. There is no light. The generator is silent and the matchbox to light the candles somewhere. He does not search for the matches. She thinks of a cold shower after dancing all night. They give in. The night rolls on them.

The morning sun over the Atlantic draws them into the day of noise. Fishing canoes rowed by the Fanti cross the horizon. She likes the room. She thinks she has been here before. He thinks everything they are doing is a reenactment of past actions. They sit on the bed and kiss. Time passes, spent, emptied of its worries. Friction of muscles and organs and tension released in a growl create a bond.

Saturday evening. He goes to her house. He asks the taxi to wait for him. She says she can’t go out. She looks above his head. Not today. Not tomorrow at the beach. Not Monday. He goes back and goes back and goes back. She has locked herself up in the realm of NO. She has decided that NO would forever be NO.

His nights are filled with sad thoughts. He walks on the beach. He swims. He goes by her house, crossing the narrow passage between the University and the Mansion, houses of power, and the envy of all. Marie Antoinette Brown Sherman, former president of the university, was now in America. President Tolbert was murdered in the Executive Mansion. At midnight, his heart was stolen by cannibals and shared with the forces of darkness in a ritual meal.

The curse.

The doctor examines her. She is on a table, legs spread, but not for love. The doctor is dressed in white, like an angel. He wears gloves made of latex from Firestone rubber plantation via a factory in Malaysia. He asks her questions about menstruation and contraceptives. He sticks a needle into her arm. He draws blood from her. He inserts his rubber-covered finger into her vagina. He touches her breasts.

Did he squeeze her nipple? He looks at her as if she was a vagina, a pair of breasts and five gallons of blood. And she pays him for all that. He enjoys this, she thinks, as she puts on her clothes.

She passes other women waiting to be looked at, probed, and diagnosed. And at night, maybe, he would go home, and another woman would be there, waiting for him in the darkness, with her clothes off, with a thin layer of perfume and he would touch her, this time with love. How can I think such things, she asks herself, and she walks out of the medical office.

The heat. Monrovia is burning. March dies, giving birth to April 2003. He is still sad but he stops crying in his sleep. He knows why he is so sad. He is lonely.

The sun is shining. She calls her sister and tells her. I can’t have a child. I can’t have this child.

They cry.

She stands in front of the mirror. She looks the same, naked. But she knows it is all-different. Nature is taking her body away. Maybe after all, God tricked her and this nipple looks darker than the other. Maybe bigger.

She goes to Randall Street. He is behind the counter. She wants to talk to him now. He says he is busy. Behind him, arranged in piles are multicolored city products from India and Nigeria - toothpaste, toothbrushes, cans of sardines, hair products, boxes of Kleenex, blank audio tapes.

She sits and waits on a bench outside. He wants to drop everything to run to her. Kiss her. Hold her. Be with her. Again and again like on that magic day. But he stays behind the counter, tears in his heart and afraid of words.

He is looking for words. Something nice or bad or harsh so he could free himself and her and go on. Shame, pain and sadness, and he is paralyzed by silence.

He will not speak to me again, she thinks. She gets off the bench and walks away. When he has found the words to speak to her, he comes outside but she is nowhere.

Gone.

He sleeps and hears the song of the waves crashing on the beach. He is sad to have lost his sadness. He was just getting comfortable feeling sad and miserable just thinking of her. Then her sister shows up. She knocks on the door and he invites her in. She does not want to come into his room. She stays outside with the Atlantic raging behind her.

I came to talk to you.

Your sister sent you?

No.

The Atlantic was roaring. Looking at him, she starts to cry.

My sister is dead. She died.

The words go through him.

She was pregnant. They found the disease in her bloodstream. The baby was taken out.

Her blood flowed all over the small, dark room in the house of the nurse on Capital By-Pass.

The nurse was a dresser at JFK, John F. Kennedy Hospital that everybody called by its post-war name, Just For killing. The nurse demanded fifty dollars for the abortion. No anesthesia and no morphine or coke. Just the plain piece of wire and her agile fingers and two verses of the Bible. They put her in a pick-up and at JFK, she was DOA - Dead On Arrival, like they say in the movies.

She had AIDS. Her funeral is a painful blur. AIDS . . .

Sunday under palm trees at Kendeja Beach. The beach is full of dancers and acrobats and good timers. Someone yelled, look over there! Stop him!

He walks and walks into the depths of the sea until the currents take him. The horizon engulfs him. The sea rages.

There is no lifeguard. His body is never found, unlike the body of the president’s brother, Steven Tolbert, who was found half-eaten by fish and crabs in 1974.

An afternoon of incredible sadness falls on those watching him as he disappears beyond the waves and is swallowed by the water.

They saw him go to his death by sea on a glorious afternoon.

© Dukulé 2005