The two brothers stood facing one another listening. All the brothers were physically alike, short and bull-like and broad, but faster-moving than they looked.
Another. A sudden loud blast, an explosion. Like a hand grenade going off, or something larger.
In the building.
Albert said, “What the hell? It’s downstairs!”
“Come on!”
Another door opened as they hurried toward the elevator, and their brother Ralph called, “What’s going on?”
“Stay here,” Kasempa shouted back. “We’ll take a look downstairs.”
The elevator was already on this floor, and the door slid back when Kasempa pressed the button. They went in together and Albert said, “All the way down?”
“Of course!”
Albert pushed the button for the first floor, the door slid shut, and they started down.
Kasempa heard the slight sound above him. He looked up, and a rectangular opening was spreading in the ceiling. He saw eyes, hands in darkness, and something was flung in.
A grenade!
“No!” he shouted, recoiling. The elevator was suddenly too small. He and Albert were cramped together; neither could move.
But the thing hit the floor without exploding. It seemed to fall apart, to break open in two halves. A faint yellowish mist rose up.
Albert was shouting, Kasempa couldn’t tell what. But he knew what that was; he knew it was gas; he knew he’d been mousetrapped and he was a dead man. He knew it, but he refused to let it be so. He pushed savagely past his brother, reaching for the buttons. He wouldn’t breathe; he refused to breathe, though he had already inhaled some of it in the first few seconds after it broke open. Albert was falling over, falling into his path, his weight leaning on Kasempa’s chest. Kasempa gritted his teeth, pushed the heavy weight away, and got his fingers on the buttons.
If he could stop the elevator. If he could get the doors open. If he could get outof here.
He could feel the nausea welling up, feel the darkness behind it. He could feel his strength draining away. He leaned on his fingers, pressing all the buttons.
The elevator was stopping. Green kaleidoscopes were irising in around the edges of his vision. Albert had slid to the floor, his weight now leaning against Kasempa’s legs, and the strength was rushing like blood out of his legs.
The door slid open. He saw it sliding, as slow as eternity, with the last of his vision, saw the second-floor displays in semidarkness, saw the green kaleidoscope iris close over his eyes, felt his hands sliding down the smooth wall of the elevator. He tried to take a step, out and away, but all that happened was that his knee bent. It kept bending.
5
Formutesca continued to sit on the trapdoor after the elevator had stopped. He could hear the door slide open. He sat there listening, controlling himself, feeling the excitement and nervousness in him like low-voltage electricity pouring through his body. Across the way, Manado sat and stared at him. But Formutesca had no time now to think about Manado or to worry about whether or not Manado would carry his weight when the time came. He had no time now to think about what was or was not happening in the elevator, no time to think about the fact that no attempt at all had been made to push the trapdoor up. All he could think about was what was happening inside himself.
Bara Formutesca was African middle class, and he himself wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. His father was a British-trained doctor, his mother a German-trained schoolteacher, and their son was an American-trained diplomat. But what did that mean, or matter?
When he was very young, six or seven, Formutesca first learned about the two words white men in his country used when referring to black men. One was a word that meant monkey, and that referred to the tribesmen outside the cities and the workers on the big estates and the urban poor. And the other was a word that meant something like civilizedand something like evolved, and that referred to the white-collar workers and the professional men, all the Africans who had received training in European skills and who conducted their lives by European standards. In the way it was used, this second word seemed to imply also a further level of meaning, something slyly contemptible, something like castratedor tamed. It had seemed to Formutesca, as a very young child hearing those words, that between the two it was better to be a monkey than a eunuch, and ever since then he had watched himself for traces of that wildness and that brash humor that he thought of as being the essence of monkeyness.
But his parentage, his background and his training all made him tend in the other direction toward the tamed. He was too intelligent to throw all that over the average “monkey” in Dhaba had an annual income of one hundred forty-seven dollars and would die of one of several possible dreadful diseases before his fortieth birthday. But when he saw the bland, emasculated Africans in their blue-gray suits gliding along the halls at the UN as though on muffled roller-skates, he determined over and over again never to let that depersonalizationwas what it was happen to him.
Could one of them possibly be here now in his place? One of those smooth-faced amiable pets? Never.
In the dim light he saw Manado’s eyes gleaming, and he suddenly smiled because it occurred to him that he and Manado were both exceptions to the rule, and for opposite reasons. Manado was a monkey trying to be a mannequin, and Formutesca was a mannequin trying to be a monkey.
Manado whispered, “What’s that sound?”
Formutesca had heard it too. A click, and then a thudding sound, and then more clicks, and then silence. He held up his hand for Manado to be quiet and listened. Nothing happened for half a minute and then the sequence started again: the click, the thud, more clicks, silence.
